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It was an informative and very enjoyable meeting. Zhenisbek shared his experience: how he started a PhD despite not planning to, his collaborators Maksat Tezekbayev, Arman Bolatov, and Rustem Takhanov, where research hypotheses come from, what to do after a desk rejection, and how to address reviewer comments.

Slides are available here.

Seminar recording: youtu.be/1RbXZne1CXc

In January, our young residents Agzam Shamsadinov and Yeraly Gainulla won SemEval Task 13C, part of the international series of NLP workshops and competitions. The task classifies code authorship into four classes: Human, AI, Hybrid, and Adversarial AI.

Agzam and Yeraly built a multimodal ensemble that analyzes code from three perspectives: code semantics through UniXcoder with Multiple Instance Learning for long files; textual patterns through MazgaBERT, which identifies characteristic templates; and statistical anomalies through XGBoost using hand-crafted style and code-structure features.

Their solution paper was published in the proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation at ACL 2026, the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The conference begins tomorrow in San Diego and is one of NLP's leading annual events. Congratulations to our students on this major achievement!

Paper: https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.137/

Speaker: Dr. Zhenisbek Assylbekov, Assistant Professor of Data Science at Purdue University Fort Wayne. He earned his PhD in Mathematics from Hiroshima University in 2008. After a brief period in industry, he worked on ML and NLP at NU from 2011. His current research explores how modern learning methods balance memorization and generalization.

At this meeting, he will focus less on the paper itself—recently accepted to ECML-PKDD 2026 and co-authored with Maksat Tezekbayev, Rustem Takhanov, and Arman Bolatov—and more on the research process that usually remains behind the scenes:

• Where a hypothesis comes from and how it takes shape
• What the team tried, what worked, and what did not
• The real publication path: a desk rejection from a Q1 journal, revisions, and submission to ECML
• Reviewer comments and how the team addressed them

📅 Friday, July 3, 12:00 Kazakhstan time. ➕ Add to calendar: https://calendar.app.google/oV3fezx1GiYirGMv5 Important: the online meeting link will be available only in the calendar event.

Submissions are open for the 13th Analysis of Images, Social Networks, and Texts conference, AIST 2026, taking place in Astana on October 16–18.

The conference focuses on data science and applications of data analysis and machine learning across computer vision, NLP, social-network analysis, geographic information systems, recommender systems, economics, education, process mining, and other fields.

Accepted papers are planned for publication in Springer LNCS and CCIS. As usual, there is no registration fee. Presentations may be delivered in person or online.

🗓 Important dates:

• Abstract: July 1, 2026
• Full paper: July 10, 2026
• Notification: August 10, 2026
• Camera-ready submission: August 18, 2026

Submit a paper