Thomas Vakili

Teacher at Stockholm University

Curriculum Vitae

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Academic Background

PhD in Computer Science — Stockholm University

2021–2026

Kista, Sweden

Doctoral degree focused on privacy-preserving machine learning for natural language processing. Supervisors: Professor Hercules Dalianis and Professor Aron Henriksson. Defended January 2026.

Visiting PhD Student — Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC)

2025

Santiago, Chile

A one-month research visit to UC to initiate a project about Spanish clinical NLP together with Assistant Professor Jocelyn Dunstan and her research group.

Visiting PhD Student — CMM Center for Mathematical Modeling

2023

Santiago, Chile

Awarded a scholarship to visit CMM in Chile for three and a half months. Worked on privacy-preserving machine learning under the guidance of Assistant Professor Jocelyn Dunstan.

MSc in Computer Science and Engineering — KTH Royal Institute of Technology

2013–2020

Stockholm, Sweden

Studied the five-year engineering program granting both an engineering diploma (Swedish: civilingenjörsexamen) and an MSc in computer science. Specialization in natural language processing and machine learning.

Persian Philology — Uppsala University

2016–2017

Uppsala, Sweden

Between the bachelor and master portions of the engineering program, studied Persian for a year at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, deepening knowledge of linguistics and philology.

Selected Industry Experience

Consultant — Netlight

Q3 2019 – Q1 2021

Stockholm

IT consultancy firm based in Stockholm with offices in multiple European cities.

Data Engineer — Spotify (via Netlight)

Q4 2020 – Q1 2021

Stockholm

Worked as a data engineer in a multinational team at Spotify. The focus of this assignment was helping Spotify develop their data pipeline to improve their curation of core datasets.

Data Scientist — PostNord (via Netlight)

Q3 2019 – Q4 2020

Stockholm

PostNord is a major logistics company based in the Nordics. Worked as a data scientist and backend developer to build machine learning-based route planning and time series prediction.

Backend Developer — Truecaller

Q2 2018 – Q4 2018

Part-time • Stockholm

Global platform providing caller ID and mobile payment systems. Worked on microservices utilizing Kafka, Cassandra, Play, and related backend technologies.

Teaching Experience

Thesis Supervision

Spring 2022 – Present

Stockholm University

Extensive supervision experience at the master and bachelor level across natural language processing and machine learning. A full list of supervised theses is available on the Teaching page.

Internet Search Techniques and Business Intelligence

Fall 2022 – Present

Lecturer & Lab Examiner • Master level

Lectures on text classification for search engines, examination, and laboratory assignment development.

Natural Language Processing

Spring 2022 – Present

Lecturer & Lab Examiner • Master level

Teacher in the master-level NLP course. Member of the founding design team; responsibilities include lectures, lab assignments, and group projects.

Language Technology

Fall 2022

Lecturer & Lab Examiner • Bachelor level

Taught bachelor-level course about language technology. Duties included examining lab assignments and lecturing on lexical resources.

Digital Business Strategies and Change Management

Fall 2021

Teaching Assistant

Teaching assistant responsible for grading essays and presentations.

Information Retrieval

Spring 2019

Teaching Assistant • KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Graded lab assignments and assisted students with information retrieval fundamentals.

Dissemination

The Secret Behind ChatGPT – How AI Works

September 2025

Interview • PC för Alla

Popular-science interview explaining large language models to a lay audience without anthropomorphic metaphors (“Hemligheten bakom Chat GPT – så fungerar AI”).

CALD-pseudo Workshop at EACL 2024

March 2024

Panelist • Malta

Participated as a panelist at the CALD-pseudo workshop. The panel discussion centered on pseudonymized data and privacy in NLP.

Bravida Developer Summit

March 2024

Invited Speaker • Stockholm

Title: AI och språkteknologi (AI and NLP). Presented the state of the art in NLP and the risks of large language models to a lay audience.

RISE Health Data Workshop

October 2022

Keynote Speaker • Stockholm

Title: Möjligheter och utmaningar inom Klinisk NLP (Possibilities and Challenges in Clinical NLP). Keynote on promising applications and privacy constraints in clinical NLP.

University of Michigan NLP4Health

September 2022

Invited Speaker • Ann Arbor (Virtual)

Title: Automatic De-Identification at Stockholm University. Presented research on automatically de-identified training data to the UMich NLP4Health group.

Publications & Theses

Preserving the Privacy of Language Models

2025

Doctoral Thesis • Stockholm University

Attacking and Defending the Privacy of Clinical Language Models

2023

Licentiate Thesis • Stockholm University

A Method for the Assisted Translation of QA Datasets Using Multilingual Sentence Embeddings

2020

Master's Thesis • KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Language Skills

Swedish Native
English Fluent
Persian Advanced
Spanish Intermediate