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Overview

Dr Noura Al Moubayed

Associate Professor


Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science
Associate Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study
Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing
Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

Biography

Dr Noura Al Moubayed is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Head of ML and AI at Evergreen Life. She leads a research lab of over 15 researchers, advancing cutting-edge machine learning and deep learning solutions with a particular focus on healthcare. Over the past seven years, she has secured more than £6 million in funding across 21 projects from EPSRC, IUK, NIHR, ERDF, and UKRI.

With over 1,500 citations and more than 120 peer-reviewed publications, Dr Al Moubayed's research spans top-tier venues such as ICLR, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, BMJ Oncology, and Nature Scientific Reports, among others. Her research attracted broad media attention, featuring in the BBC, ITV, Time Magazine, Wired, and New Scientist, and in 2019 she was recognised among the top 20 women in AI in the UK by RE•WORK. 

Dr Al Moubayed has over a decade of experience in explainable machine learning, natural language processing, and AI fairness. Her work includes building explainable ML models tailored for predicting organ failure in chemotherapy patients, in collaboration with UCL and UCL Hospitals under a Biomedical Catalyst grant. She also developed explainable models for forecasting A&E admissions and readmissions—research endorsed by NIHR, and presented in the Department of Health and Social Care policy briefing, and awarded Best Talk at the Society for Acute Medicine International Conference 2023. Her leadership in translating AI research into clinical impact reflects her dual academic and applied expertise.

Dr Al Moubayed also serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence and N8 CIR Machine Learning team lead for Durham where she was named Outstanding Associate Editor for 2024. She also serves as Organiser and co-leads for BioLaySumm Shared Task on Lay Summarisation of Biomedical Research Articles and Radiology Reports at BioNLP, ACL 2025.

Her latest contributions push the frontier of Mechanistic Interpretability in large language models. At ICML 2025,  introduced "Inference-Time Decomposition of Activations (ITDA): A Scalable Approach to Interpreting Large Language Models", a scalable, data- and compute-efficient alternative to sparse autoencoders (SAEs) for interpreting LLM activations. ITDA maintains over 90% of SAE reconstruction performance and supports robust cross-model comparisons, outperforming SVCCA and CKA in representation similarity tasks. At ICLR 2025, her paper Sparse Autoencoders Do Not Find Canonical Units of Analysis challenges core assumptions in mechanistic interpretability using SAE stitching and meta-SAEs. The findings reveal that existing SAEs fail to yield complete or atomic features, and introduce BatchTopK SAEs to better structure sparse representations. An interactive dashboard of the meta-SAE decompositions is publicly available at https://metasaes.streamlit.app.

In addition, her ACL 2025 (main track) paper "Analyzing LLMs' Cognition of Knowledge Boundary Across Languages Through the Lens of Internal Representation", presents the first cross-lingual analysis of how large language models perceive knowledge boundaries, an essential step toward reducing hallucinations in multilingual settings. By probing internal representations across languages, she shows that knowledge boundary signals are encoded in mid to upper layers and follow a linear cross-lingual structure. Her work introduces a training-free alignment method and demonstrates that bilingual fine-tuning enhances cross-lingual boundary recognition, supported by a newly released multilingual evaluation suite.

Research interests

  • Mechanistic Interpretability
  • Machine Learning for Healthcare
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Multimodal Machine Learning
  • Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning
  • Explainable Machine Learning

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