About Negar
My name is Negar Arabzadeh. In Persian, "Negar" means beloved or a piece of art to be cherished.
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I am a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, working with Professor Matei Zaharia. I completed my PhD at the University of Waterloo, where I was advised by Dr. Charles Clarke.
I was born and raised in Iran and moved to Canada in 2017 to pursue my dreams. After eight years of living in Canada, I finally moved to the place I had dreamt of as a child, California!
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Things I love:
I enjoy doing research in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing a lot! I also have a big collection of board games and love playing them, along with video games. I get very competitive when I play!
I also have a cat named "Chaloos", named after the most beautiful road I’ve ever seen in Iran.
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Education
2021 - 2025
PhD - Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Supervisor: Dr. Charles Clarke
2017 - 2019
Masters - Electrical and Computer Engineering
Toronto Metropolitan University
Supervisor: Dr. Ebrahim Bagheri
2012 - 2017
Bachelor - Electrical Engineering
AmirKabir University of Technology
2009 - 2012
Farzanegan Highschool
National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET)
Awards
and
Honors
2023- Honorable mention award at 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024)
2023- Honored to receive Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)
2023- Honored to receive David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship for scholastic excellence
2022- Best Paper Award at 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022)
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2022- Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) AI Week Talent Bursary
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2021- Honored to receive returning offer for Microsoft Research Summer Internship
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​2021- Best Reviewer Award at ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
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2021- Provost Doctoral Entrance Award for Women at University of Waterloo
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2021- University of Waterloo Entrance Scholarship
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2020- Runner-up in SOSCIP's 3 Minute Thesis Competition at Advance Ontario
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2018- Ryerson Graduate Development Award
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2012- Exempted from university entrance
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2011- 1st place at Khwarizmi International Award at junior soccer robots
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2010- Qualified and participated in 15th Robocup competition at junior soccer league
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2010- 1st place at 5th International IranOpen competition at junior soccer robots league