APPLIED SCIENTIST · AI SAFETY · TRUSTWORTHY MULTIMODAL & MULTILINGUAL AI

Vicky Feliren

he/him

I work on AI safety. One half is getting a model to surface what it actually knows and to hold back when it should. The other is making that reliability hold for the languages and contexts it was never built for.

Conformal prediction, interpretability, and abstention you can trust. Published in academic conferences and journals, and building open AI infrastructure for Southeast Asia.

Right now
  • Currently: M.Sc. thesis on uncertainty in vision-language models · Monash University
  • Contributing to SEACrowd, open AI infrastructure for Southeast Asia

I'm an applied scientist working on AI safety. I want models to surface what they actually know, to hold back when they should, and to do both reliably for the languages and contexts they were never trained on. Concretely, that means trustworthy multimodal systems that are reliable when it matters and relevant to the places they operate in.

At Monash University, I'm working with Associate Professor Risqi Saputra and Professor Taufiq Asyhari on conformal prediction for vision-language navigation. The goal is simple to state and hard to achieve. When a model claims confidence, we want that confidence backed by provable bounds.

The other thread in my work is cultural inclusion. Southeast Asia is one of the world's most linguistically and visually diverse regions, and it's almost entirely absent from the training data and benchmarks that define what modern AI can and cannot do. I've been building the datasets, benchmarks, and adaptation methods to change that, with SEACrowd and through my own research.

This Month · updated June 2026

  • Writing up my M.Sc. thesis on conformal prediction for vision-language navigation, sharpening the abstention and set-efficiency results
  • Following up the multilingual VLM study: turning cross-lingual activation steering for abstention from a hackathon proof into a real method
  • Testing whether abstention signals and honesty directions transfer across languages, or fail silently outside English

Tech Stack

Conformal Prediction Vision-Language Models Semantic Segmentation Diffusion Models PyTorch TensorFlow PEFT DeepSpeed vLLM FastAPI scikit-learn XGBoost Google Earth Engine Python GCP Vertex AI Kubernetes Docker BigQuery SQL dbt MLflow Weights & Biases LangSmith LLM Evaluation SHAP

Research Agenda

I work on one question from two sides. Getting a model to surface what it actually knows, and to hold back when it should, reliably, for the languages and contexts it was never trained on. Three open problems I would bet on, and the place I pressure-test them. Each sits in the gap between two communities that rarely talk to each other, which is usually where the tractable and neglected work hides.

Saying what you know, in any language

Models often state a confident falsehood while their own representations encode the correct answer, and the gap widens when the modalities disagree or the query is in a low-resource language. I want systems that defer to their own better-supported internal belief, and I want us to actually measure how this failure shifts across languages, because almost no one does. A model that confidently states a falsehood it could have flagged is a deployment hazard, not a rounding error.

Whether our safety tools even work outside English

Probing and activation steering are becoming the core tools for reading a model's internal state for deception, refusal, or harmful intent. Almost all of that work is validated in English, and we do not know whether a probe or a steering vector transfers to another language or fails silently outside it. If internal monitoring holds for English and breaks for the languages most of the world actually uses, the safety stack carries a language-shaped hole and a false sense of security with it.

Making "I do not know" trustworthy, with guarantees

Deployed and agentic multimodal systems need to know when not to act, but their confidence signals are poorly calibrated and carry no guarantees. Conformal prediction gives distribution-free coverage guarantees, and extending it to multimodal, sequential, and free-form generation is largely open. An agent that acts confidently when it should defer is a direct path to loss of control. Calibrated, guaranteed abstention is one of the few safety levers I can make rigorous.

Where it gets tested

These ideas have to survive contact with messy data. I pressure-test them in vision-language navigation, the subject of my thesis, in multimodal models for earth observation published in IEEE and Remote Sensing of Environment, and in open multilingual AI for Southeast Asia with SEACrowd and SEA-VL. The regions and sensors that English-first, benchmark-first AI never really sees.

Track Record

WORK EXPERIENCE

  1. OCT 2024 – PRESENT

    SEACrowd - Researcher, Multimodal & Vision-Language

    Open-science research collective · seacrowd.github.io

  2. FEB 2025 – NOV 2025

    Artefact - Senior Data Scientist

    French AI consulting · Founding technical member, Jakarta office

  3. DEC 2022 – JAN 2025

    Monash University - Research Associate

    Global research consortium: Monash, UQ, UCL, Nottingham

  4. JUN 2021 – JUN 2023

    GDP Labs (GLAIR.ai) - Senior Data Scientist / ML Engineer

    AI consulting, backed by a major Indonesian conglomerate

  5. JAN 2021 – JUN 2021

    Jakarta Smart City - Data Scientist

    Indonesia's smart city government initiative

PATENT

  1. ISSUED JUNE 2025

    Fish & Shrimp Pond Detection via Satellite Imagery

    IDS000010594

TALKS

  1. MAY 2026

    PyPalu, Python for Localized Context

    Python community meetup · Sulawesi Tengah, Indonesia

  2. 2025

    MUSE, How Data Science Differs in Each Sector

    Panel speaker · Monash University Indonesia

  3. OCT 2024

    Bank of Indonesia, Data Synthesis, Privacy & Responsible Data Management

    Invited talk · Bank of Indonesia

  4. Q3 2026 OPEN

    Available for conference talks, podcasts, and panel invitations

    Topics: trustworthy AI, conformal prediction, AI for Southeast Asia

EDUCATION

  1. EXPECTED SEPT 2026

    Monash University

    Master of Data Science · GPA: 4.0/4.0

  2. JUN 2026

    BlueDot Impact, Technical AI Safety

    Cohort intensive · alignment, interpretability, red-teaming, AI control

  3. DECEMBER 2019

    Monash University

    Bachelor of Computer Science

  4. MAR – DEC 2019

    Monash CURIE Compass

    Mentee · Centre for Undergraduate Research Initiatives and Excellence

  5. JUN – DEC 2018

    Nanyang Technological University

    Computer Science Exchange Programme · Singapore

  6. 2019

    Udacity, Deep Learning Nanodegree

    Neural networks, CNNs, RNNs, GANs · Facebook AI scholarship recipient

TEACHING

  1. MAY 2026

    Monash University PGIE, Industry Judge

    Faculty of IT Postgraduate Industry Experience

  2. MAY 2026 – JUN 2026

    IBM SkillsBuild

    Capstone Project Advisor

  3. MAY 2026 – JUN 2026

    Coding Camp powered by DBS Foundation

    Capstone Project Advisor

  4. JAN 2024 – JAN 2025

    Bangkit Academy (Google, Gojek, Traveloka)

    ML Instructor & Capstone Advisor

  5. NOV 2024

    Bina Nusantara University

    Guest Lecturer, Computer Vision

Recognition

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

  • Industry Judge: Monash FIT PGIE 2026, evaluated 6 cross-disciplinary teams (36 students) from Master of AI, Data Science, and IT presenting real-world industry projects.
  • Peer Reviewer: IEEE IGARSS 2026, Premier global remote sensing and geoscience symposium.
  • Technical Judge: Cal Hacks 8.0, CruzHacks 2022, iNTUition v8.0, evaluated 50+ projects across three international hackathons.
  • Open Source Contributor: SEACrowd collective, building AI infrastructure and data democratization for Southeast Asia.

Notes on AI safety and trustworthy AI, research, and the occasional essay.

Essay

Knowing when you don't know is the core safety property

Why calibrated abstention, more than raw capability, is what makes a model safe to deploy.

Read the essay →
Featured in The Business Times

AI rules in SEA: the risks, the fines, what you need to know

Featured coverage on AI regulation across Southeast Asia, examining the emerging rules, enforcement risks, and compliance requirements shaping the region's AI landscape.

Read in The Business Times →

Open to

Let's Collaborate

I work on AI safety for trustworthy, multimodal, and multilingual systems. If any of the below fits where you are, I would be glad to hear from you.

Research Collaboration Speaking Mentorship Research & Applied Roles
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