PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Fattane Zarrinkalam

Fattane Zarrinkalam is an AI researcher whose work spans social-media mining, information retrieval and question answering. After earning a PhD from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and holding a postdoctoral fellowship at Ryerson University from 2018 to 2020, she worked at Thomson Reuters Labs and joined the University of Guelph's School of Engineering in 2021. At Guelph, she developed user-interest prediction frameworks using Wikipedia categories in 2022 and learn-to-rank methods in 2024, led a 2025–2026 retrieval-augmented generation project for meat-processing food safety, and coauthored 2026 preprints on factual error repair in RAG and large language models in security operations. As of October 2026, she is a faculty member in Guelph's College of Engineering and a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2018–2020

    PhD and Ryerson postdoc

    She earns a PhD from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran and works as a postdoctoral research fellow at Ryerson University from 2018 to 2020. Starting in 2020, she co-chairs the International Workshop on Mining Actionable Insights from Social Network (MAISoN).

  2. 2021

    Joining Guelph Engineering

    In 2021, she joins the University of Guelph's School of Engineering as an assistant professor after working at Thomson Reuters Labs as a Research Scientist on legal-domain information retrieval and question answering. Her earlier postdoctoral fellowship is at the Laboratory for Systems, Software, and Semantics (LS3) at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she works on semantic-enabled social media analysis. At Guelph, she researches social-media mining and user-generated content, and in 2021 she joins the Vector Institute Postgraduate Affiliate Program and serves on editorial boards for special issues of Information Processing & Management and IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering.

  3. 2022

    Wikipedia category interest modeling

    In 2022, she models users' long-term interests with the Wikipedia Category structure to predict their future interests on social networks. She also receives an Outstanding Reviewer Award at the 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022) and serves as chair of the IEEE Kitchener-Waterloo Women in Engineering chapter in June 2022.

  4. 2024

    Learning to rank user interests

    In 2024, she develops a learn-to-rank reference framework for supervised machine learning that predicts the future interests of social-media users.

  5. 2025–2026

    LLMs for food safety

    For the 2025/2026 funding cycle, she is the lead applicant on an Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance Tier 1 project that applies retrieval-augmented generation and a large language model to identify and track critical control points for food safety in meat-processing facilities.

  6. June 2026

    Repairing factual errors in RAG

    In June 2026, she coauthors the arXiv preprint 'Diagnosing and Repairing Factual Errors in RAG under Budget Constraints' with Soroush Hashemifar, Havva Alizadeh Noughabi and Ali Dehghantanha.

  7. August 2026

    LLMs in security operations

    In August 2026, with Elnaz Rabieinejad, Ali Dehghantanha and Sarina Dastgerdy, she coauthors the arXiv preprint 'Beyond the Hype: Evaluating LLM Integration and Practical Limitations in Security Operation Centers.' It draws on interviews with Security Operations Center practitioners to explore adoption readiness and introduces a maturity rubric emphasizing auditability and transparent explanations.

  8. As of October 2026

    Guelph faculty and Vector affiliate

    As of October 2026, she is a faculty member in the University of Guelph's College of Engineering and a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute. In August 2026, she co-chairs the first International SECURE-AGRO Workshop.

Career

  1. NowUniversity of GuelphAssistant Professor
  2. NowVector InstituteFaculty Affiliate
  3. Until 2021Thomson ReutersResearch Scientist
  4. 2018–2020Ryerson UniversityPostdoctoral Research Fellow
  5. Toronto Metropolitan UniversityPostdoctoral Fellow

Education

  1. Ferdowsi University of MashhadPhD

From the biography.

  1. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Vector Institute. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  2. Nonprofit roles are 2.3 times as common in AI safetyIncludes Vector Institute. We estimate where people focused on safety, alignment and evaluation work. Nonprofit roles appear for 25.1% of safety people with known affiliations, compared with 11.0% in other areas.
  3. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Vector Institute. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  4. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes Vector Institute. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Fattane Zarrinkalam | Engineering uoguelph.ca. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Fattane Zarrinkalam - Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence vectorinstitute.ai. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Q&A with Dr. Fattane Zarrinkalam | College of Computational, Mathematical and Physical Sciences uoguelph.ca. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Machine-learning advances personal ads | College of Computational, Mathematical and Physical Sciences uoguelph.ca. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Leveraging Large Language Models to Enhance Monitoring and Reporting in Meat Processing Facilities | Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance uoguelph.ca. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. [2606.29377] Diagnosing and Repairing Factual Errors in RAG under Budget Constraints arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. [2608.17154] Beyond the Hype: Evaluating LLM Integration and Practical Limitations in Security Operation Centers arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. 1st International SECURE-AGRO Workshop — Cyber Science Lab cybersciencelab.com. Checked 22 October 2026.