Hanna Shcharbakova

Hi, I’m Hanna Shcharbakova

Hanna Shcharbakova
ELLIS & MCML PhD Researcher TU Munich & Cambridge Heilbronn, Germany
Previous position
Senior AI Engineer, Pleias

I am a first-year PhD researcher in Computer Science, an ELLIS student at TU Munich (Campus Heilbronn) and the University of Cambridge, advised by Prof. Alexander Fraser and Prof. Anna Korhonen. My work is funded by the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML).

Originally from Belarus, I hold a BA in Fundamental and Applied Linguistics from HSE University and an MSc in NLP from Saarland University and the University of Lorraine, as part of the Erasmus Mundus LCT programme. I have worked as an AI / NLP engineer and researcher for +7 years in Russia, Italy and France — see career for the details.

Most of my work has been some form of AI for social impact, built where data and hardware are scarce, released openly, and judged by whether it can be trusted. Check out my interests, additional projects and publications pages if you want the specifics.

News

  1. 09-2026

    Just wrapped up the Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS 2026) in Tübingen, Germany 🇩🇪!

  2. 07-2026

    At the ELLIS Doctoral Symposium 2026 in Lisbon, Portugal 🇵🇹.

  3. 07-2026

    Started my PhD at TU Munich (Campus Heilbronn) and the University of Cambridge, advised by Prof. Alexander Fraser and Prof. Anna Korhonen.

  4. 2026

    Accepted to the ELLIS PhD programme, affiliated with TU Munich and the University of Cambridge (around a 7% acceptance rate).

  5. 2026

    Awarded the MCML Matching Grant from the Munich Center for Machine Learning for the PhD at TUM (around a 1% acceptance rate).

  6. 03-2026

    Released French Science Commons with the Pleias team — 1,248,860 scientific documents (1,189,628 articles and 59,232 theses) drawn from HAL, OpenAlex, journals and institutional repositories, to keep French-language science discoverable in a field dominated by English.

  7. 02-2026

    Completed the Technical AI Safety Course from BlueDot Impact — deepening my expertise in AI safety!

  8. 12-2025

    Joined Pleias as a Senior AI Engineer! Working on open science projects with focus on synthetic data and small language models, and leading AI-enhanced digital learning work with Kajou and Libraries Without Borders.

Show the other 16 →Show fewer ↑

  1. 08-2025

    Invited to the EM LCT Summer School to share my experience studying at this program with LCT students!

  2. 08-2025

    Delighted to share that Cross-Lingual Fact Verification: Analyzing LLM Performance Patterns across Languages was accepted at RANLP 2025. See you in Bulgaria! 🇧🇬

  3. 07-2025

    Graduated from Saarland University with an excellent grade of 1.5!

  4. 07-2025

    Attended ACL 2025 to present my research — incredible insights and networking opportunities!

  5. 07-2025

    Thrilled to receive a fully funded grant to attend the EEML Summer School and honored to receive the Best Poster Award!

  6. 06-2025

    Selected for oral presentation at the ACL FEVER Workshop 2025 for When Scale Meets Diversity: Evaluating Language Models on Fine-Grained Multilingual Claim Verification. Achieved new state-of-the-art results with 57.7% macro-F1 using XLM-R — a 15.8-point improvement over the previous best!

  7. 05-2025

    Selected to participate in the M2L Summer School!

  8. 04-2025

    Excited to share that our team achieved strong results in the SemEval Mu-SHROOM shared task for hallucination detection — 2nd place for Mandarin Chinese and top-10 placements in 7 other language tracks! Our paper was also accepted for publication.

  9. 02-2025

    Successfully defended my thesis at Saarland University and received a 1.1 grade!

  10. 02-2025

    Completed a major milestone in the ALLIES project — our real-time sensitive content detection system is now successfully deployed. We presented the results at a conference in Spain!

  11. 12-2024

    Completed my Dutch course at A2 level at the University of Groningen!

  12. 11-2024

    Started working on a SemEval shared task at the University of Groningen!

  13. 10-2024

    Partnered with a startup to improve AI-generated text detection for the community!

  14. 09-2024

    Started an Erasmus+ exchange at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Grateful for the Erasmus+ and Santander Scholarships supporting this academic journey.

  15. 09-2024

    Attended the Athens NLP Summer School.

  16. 2024

    Awarded the Jean Monnet Scholarship.