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Umanga Bista (उमङ्ग बिष्ट)

I'm Umanga Bista, based in Melbourne, Australia, originally from Lamjung, Nepal.

I am interested in applying Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, and also in analyzing web and social media data.

Senior Applied Scientist of Artificial Intelligence at Oracle [May 2021 - now]

I joined Oracle in Melbourne, Australia as Applied AI Scientist. Currently i work in applying AI to solve problems in clinical/medical domains using Gen AI, RAG, etc. I previously worked in Natural Language Processing for building Conversational AI, and building Oracle Agents platform.

Australian National University [Mar 2017-Apr 2021]

I did PhD at the Computational Media Lab, Australian National University. My thesis title is "Comparative Summarization of Document Collections".

My PhD supervisors were Prof. Lexing Xie, Dr. Aditya Menon, Dr. Alexander Mathews and Dr. Lizhen Qu.

I was also a Casual Research Engineer in Computational Media Lab, developing and maintaining 24x7 scalable data collection and preprocessing pipelines.

Tutoring: Programming for Data Scientists [2020], Intro to Machine Learning [2020], Document Analysis [2017, 2018]

Publications

• Umanga Bista, Alexander Mathews, Aditya Krishna Menon, Lexing Xie. (2020). SupMMD: A Sentence Importance Model for Extractive Summarization using Maximum Mean Discrepancy. In Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2020 [arxiv link] [Code]

• Umanga Bista, Alexander Mathews, Minjeong Shin, Aditya Krishna Menon, Lexing Xie. (2019). Comparative Document Collection via Classification. In Associations of Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) [arxiv link] [Code + Dataset] [Supplementary Info]

• Aditya Mogadala, Umanga Bista, Lexing Xie, Achim Rettinger. (2018). Knowledge Guided Attention and Inference for Describing Images Containing Unseen Objects. In European Semantic Web Conference [Link]

• M Shin, D Kim, JH Lee, U Bista, L Xie. (2019). Visualizing Graph Differences from Social Media Streams International Conference of Web and Social Media (WSDM) Demo [PDF]

Complete list on Google scholar

Past

• I was working as Research Engineer at LogPoint [Oct 2013 - Feb 2017].
• I was a computer engineering student at Institute of Engineering, Central Campus Pulchowk, Lalitpur, Nepal [Nov 2009 - Sep 2013].
• Previously, I have worked on a project for financial data representation and mining using XBRL with Office of Company Registrar, Nepal [Oct 2012 - Sep 2013].