AI Evaluation & Strategy
for Organizations that Can't Afford to Get it Wrong
Zoorna AI is a specialist advisory practice for organizations deploying AI in regulated, multilingual, and high-stakes contexts.
We help leaders evaluate AI systems, design responsible deployments, and build the cultural and linguistic competence their AI strategy actually requires.
SERVICES
Our Services
Zoorna AI delivers focused advisory engagements in four areas. Each is anchored in two decades of applied AI experience and grounded in the specific challenges of deploying AI across languages, cultures, and regulated environments.
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AI Strategy & Roadmap
For leadership teams that need a credible plan for AI adoption
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Current-state assessment and readiness analysis
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Prioritized use-case roadmap with sequencing and dependencies
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Governance and regulatory alignment (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, sector-specific requirements)
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Written strategy ready for board, executive team, or funder review
02
LLM Evaluation
Research-grade assessment of LLM systems for organizations where deployment decisions have real consequences.
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Custom evaluation framework design tied to your use case
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Vendor and model comparison with decision-grade reporting
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Rubric development, AI-judge calibration, and adjudication workflows
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Evaluation infrastructure handoff so your team can run it after we're done
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Multilingual & Cultural AI
Evaluation, deployment strategy, and cultural alignment for AI products operating across languages and cultural contexts.
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Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural failure mode detection
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Heritage and low-resource language strategy
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Cultural-pragmatic alignment review for global product teams
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Specialized expertise in the languages of the Middle East
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AI Literacy & Enablement
Executive-level AI education and workforce enablement tailored to your industry.
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Board and executive briefings on AI strategy, risk, and capability
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Custom AI literacy curricula for leadership teams
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Industry-specific workshops for professional services firms and regulated industries
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Train-the-trainer programs for internal AI champions
APPROACH
Why Zoorna AI
Zoorna AI is a one-person practice. The work is done by the founder, Dr. Karine Megerdoomian, not delegated to a team. That structure is the point: organizations engaging Zoorna AI get direct access to two decades of applied AI experience without the layers that usually come between a senior expert and the actual work.
The work also draws on a specific set of strengths most AI consultants don't have:
Eighteen years of federal R&D. Government and judicial sponsors expect AI that works under operational scrutiny. That experience shapes how Zoorna AI approaches evaluation, governance, and deployment readiness — built for contexts where the cost of getting it wrong is real.
Linguistic depth. Trained as a computational linguist, with formal linguistics grounding and ongoing research on multilingual NLP and cultural alignment in LLMs. This surfaces failure modes that interface-level multilingual testing misses.
Languages of the Middle East and the Caucasus. Specialized expertise in Persian, Armenian, and related low-resource and heritage languages — relevant to product teams working in those markets, diaspora-serving organizations, and global products where cultural-pragmatic competence affects outcomes.
ABOUT
About
Karine
Zoorna AI is the advisory practice of Dr. Karine Megerdoomian, a computational linguist and AI researcher with 20+ years of experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and applied AI.
Karine spent 18 years at the MITRE Corporation, most recently as Principal AI Engineer, leading multi-year applied AI research and evaluation programs for federal sponsors — including the US Courts, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Census Bureau, and Department of Defense partners. Her work covered LLM evaluation, multilingual NLP, narrative and event analytics, structured information extraction, and responsible AI governance for high-stakes deployment contexts.
She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California, a master's with secondary specialization in neural computation (USC), a Bachelor of Science in Physics, and completed the Chief Technology Officer Program at the Wharton School.
Karine has been a research voice in computational linguistics for over two decades. Her recent and forthcoming publications include co-authored work on cultural-pragmatic alignment in LLMs (EMNLP 2025), a book chapter on Persian language pedagogy (Routledge, 2026), and prior work in PNAS, EMNLP, NAACL, ACL, COLING, LREC, and leading theoretical linguistics journals. She has served as NSF Linguistics Program reviewer, organized the SilkRoadNLP Workshop at EACL 2026, and serves on the doctoral committee of a PhD candidate at Université Paris Cité.
She also founded and directs the Zoorna Institute for Language, AI, and Society, a nonprofit research and education entity advancing multilingual NLP and low-resource language technology.
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.