Nabila Siregar

[first_name].[last_name]@student.uva.nl

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I’m a machine learning engineer and researcher based in Amsterdam. My recent work focuses on emergent communication in AI, but I’m broadly interested in improving reasoning capabilities in intelligent machines and exploring fundamental questions like how structure and meaning evolve?

Prior to my master’s, I worked in the industry for 2 years as a software engineer. I care about both building scalable production ML systems and understanding how and why they work.

Here’s what I’ve been doing lately:

  • [September 2023] Started my master’s program in Computational Science at the University of Amsterdam
  • [1 November 2024-31 January 2025] ML Engineer internship at ING Bank
  • [May 2025] My first publication in a peer-reviewed journal. We used machine learning and causal discovery algorithms to reveal connections between Major Depressive Disorder and Cardiovascular Disease
  • [August 2025] Defended my master’s thesis, “Emergent Communication via Cognitive Graphs” to explore how neural (AI) agents developed a ‘language’ to solve a navigation task without us telling them how (supervised by Dr. Raquel G. Alhama and Phong Le). It sits at the intersection between Deep Reinforcement Learning and Natural Language Processing
  • [September 2025-now] Extending thesis work on emergent communication for a publication

At my core, I love learning and solving interdisciplinary complex problems.