Dhairya B. Dalal

Dhairya Dalal is a Ph.D. student in the Unit for Natural Language Processing at the Data Science Institute (DSI) at NUI Galway and is supervised by Dr. Paul Buitelaar and Dr. Mihael Arcan. Dhairya is broadly interested in developing unified language models to support causal reasoning over texts and natural language understanding. His research focuses on structuring knowledge within language models with external knowledge graphs to support causal reasoning across various NLP tasks including question answering, information retrieval, relation extraction, and event linking.

Before joining NUI Galway, Dhairya led deep learning research at the MIT-based fintech startup Posh Technologies. He has ten years of industry and startup experience in applied deep learning, data science, and technical project management. Dhairya has worked at the VC-backed AI startup Talla, the Allen Institutes for Artificial Intelligence and Brain Science, and Harvard University. Dhairya is passionate about the intersection of social impact and technology. He co-founded the non-profit City Awake, which was acquired by the Boston Chamber of Commerce, and ran Boston’s first social impact startup accelerator in partnership with the Unreasonable Institute. Dhairya has a Masters’s degree in Software Engineering from Harvard University, where he completed his thesis under the guidance of Dr. Stuart Shieber. His undergraduate degrees are in English and Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Rochester.

Supervisors: Dr. Paul Buitelaar