Ready to bring AI into your organization?
We design, build, and evaluate AI systems
For leaders who need more than a roadmap.
Zoorna AI brings the technical depth of a research engineering practice and the strategic clarity of senior advisory, with specialized expertise in multilingual, cross-cultural, and high-stakes contexts that most AI teams don't have.
Our Services
APPROACH
Why Zoorna AI
Zoorna AI brings together research-grade technical depth and rare linguistic expertise to design, build, and evaluate AI systems that actually perform in the real world, across languages, cultures, and operational contexts that most AI teams aren't equipped to handle.
Every engagement is led by Dr. Karine Megerdoomian, a computational linguist and AI researcher with 20+ years of applied research and engineering experience, since before large language models existed. That means direct access to senior expertise, not a junior team interpreting your needs up a chain. And it means perspective that only comes from having watched multiple AI hype cycles come and go, and knowing what actually holds up.
The work draws on four core strengths most AI consultants don't have:
* Two decades of applied AI research and engineering. From federal R&D at MITRE to commercial deployments, the work has always been evaluated against operational reality not benchmark scores. That rigor shapes every system we design and every evaluation we run.
* Linguistic and cultural depth. Formally trained as a computational linguist, with ongoing research on multilingual NLP, cultural-pragmatic alignment, and narrative AI. This surfaces failure modes that standard testing consistently misses, because most AI teams optimize for data. We optimize for language.
* Responsible AI as a design principle, not a compliance checkbox. We build ethical, inclusive AI practices into systems from the start, through better data, better representation, and genuine attention to who gets left out.
* Languages of the Middle East and the Caucasus. Specialized expertise in Persian, Armenian, and related low-resource and heritage languages, directly relevant to global product teams, educational institutions, and diaspora-serving organizations.
ABOUT
About
Karine
Zoorna AI is the applied AI practice of Dr. Karine Megerdoomian, a computational linguist and AI systems architect with 20+ years of experience building and evaluating AI systems for federal agencies, commercial clients, and research institutions. She spent 18 years at MITRE as Principal AI Engineer and holds a PhD in Linguistics from USC and a CTO certification from Wharton.
Selected Projects
STEM-Focused LLM Evaluation Framework
Zoorna AI, 2025
Designed a multi-axis evaluation framework assessing prompt-strategy effects on LLM performance across STEM reasoning tasks. Built structured methodologies spanning reasoning quality, constraint adherence, groundedness, interpretability, and cost-performance tradeoffs across multiple frontier models.
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Rubric development with anchor examples
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AI-judge calibration with human adjudication workflows
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Structured-output validation across frontier model families
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Evaluation infrastructure handed off for ongoing internal use
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Multi-Agent Curriculum Pipeline for Language Learning
Zoorna AI, 2025-2026
Led the design and build of a modular, multi-agent LLM pipeline for CEFR-aligned language-learning curriculum generation. Combined LLM generation agents with deterministic modules to maintain pedagogical and linguistic constraints across multiple target languages.
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Contrastive typological tagging across learner/target language pairs
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Difficulty weighting and CEFR scope validation
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Dependency mapping for structured content delivery
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Validated across several language pairs
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AI Program Leadership for the US Federal Judiciary
MITRE, 2017-2023
Led an applied AI program for the US federal judiciary covering workflow discovery, technical specification, prototype development, and deployment readiness for AI-supported information extraction and decision-support capabilities. Deliverables supported high-stakes, life-affecting judicial decisions.
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Multi-source structured extraction from OCR'd narrative documents
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Risk-assessment and narrative-analysis capabilities
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Governance and evaluation framework for high-stakes deployment
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Stakeholder engagement across program leadership and operational users
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Cultural-Pragmatic Alignment Diagnostics for LLMs
Zoorna Institute, 2025
Co-authored research demonstrating systematic failure modes in mainstream LLMs on Persian cultural-pragmatic norms — published at EMNLP 2025. The diagnostic approach surfaces a class of alignment failures invisible to standard multilingual benchmarks, directly relevant to product teams deploying LLM-based interfaces in global, multilingual, or culturally diverse markets.
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CONTACT
Get in Touch
For inquiries about advisory engagements, evaluations, or speaking, reach out here or email karine@zoorna.ai. We typically respond within two business days.