Malika Buribayeva is an undergraduate student at Lehigh University pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering and a B.A. in Product Design. As a Rossin Research Scholar in the AIR Lab, she works under the supervision of Dr. Aparna Bharati and Dr. Cristian-Ioan Vasile. Her research focuses on how intelligent systems perceive, reason, and act in environments shared with people, spanning vision-language models, deep and reinforcement learning, perception and planning for autonomous systems, and human-robot interaction.
Malika’s current work combines open-vocabulary perception, vision-language reasoning, planning, and conformal prediction for risk-aware action selection in urban driving. She has previously worked on humanitarian research in Kazakhstan applying HCI methods to educational technology. She has also built AR/VR experiences for documenting community care practices through theater, and developed VR applications for materials science education with Lehigh’s Nano | Human Interfaces (NHI) Presidential Initiative. Her design background informs her interest in the human side of these systems: how people perceive, interpret, and interact with visual and spatial form. She is also interested in parallel computing and distributed systems for machine learning.
Beyond research, Malika is a teaching assistant for introductory computer science and engineering courses at Lehigh. She is also a TRAC Writing Fellow, helping students develop written assignments across disciplines.
In her spare time, Malika practices Arab dance and Caribbean dance at Lehigh and works in the visual arts. She is the founder and an e-board member of Lehigh’s Central Asian Students Association. Originally from Almaty, Kazakhstan, she loves hiking and running.