Nabila Siregar

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

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Hi, I’m a machine learning engineer and researcher based in Amsterdam. My recent work focuses on emergent communication in AI, my (broad) research interest is 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 where I built internal tools and automated CI/CD for production environments. I am also an open-source contributor to Redis Vector Library.

Here’s what I’ve been doing lately:

  • [February 2026] Started a new research project working on machine-to-machine communication with small language models (tinyLLM)
  • [December 2025] 🥳 Paper accepted at Evolang 2026 as a podium presentation. See you in Plovdiv, Bulgaria!
  • [September 2025-November 2025] Extending thesis work on emergent communication. Here, I created and manipulated datasets for training, trained and fine-tuned models on GPU.
  • [August 2025] Defended my master’s thesis, “Emergent Communication via Cognitive Graphs” to explore how AI agents developed a communication protocol to solve a navigation task using deep RL (supervised by Dr. Raquel G. Alhama and Dr. Phong Le).
  • [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
  • [November 2024-February 2025] ML Engineer internship at ING Bank
  • [September 2023] Started my master’s program in Computational Science at the University of Amsterdam

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