Experiences

Research/Professional Experience

Scientist, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar, Oct-2019 to Present

• Disinformation in Social Media (http://tanbih.qcri.org)

Post-Doctoral Researcher, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar, Feb-2018 to Sept-2019

• CrisisDPS (http://crisisdps.qcri.org/)

• Responsible for AIDR (http://aidr.qcri.org) system development and maintenance

• Exploring domain adaptation techniques using deep learning

• Investigating how multimodality (text and image) can help in crisis computing

Research Associate, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar, Sept-2016 to Jan - 2018

- Developed Image Processing Pipeline into AIDR system

PhD Research , SIS Lab, University of Trento, Italy. Nov-2011 to Dec-2016.

• Segmenting Emotional Episodes: Currently working on the problem of segmenting and classifying emotional episodes in conversations. In a call center conversation, a client might be angry at some point of the conversation and perhaps after certain time he/she might be happy or shows satisfactory expressions. In my research, I am trying to automatically segment these temporal emotional phenomena using machine-learning approaches.

• Conversation Summarization: We are working on summarizing conversations in terms of emotion, topic and sentiment by utilizing NLP and Machine Learning techniques from speech and social media. Conversation summarization is a part of European Union funded project aimed to advance the next-generation analytics technology (http://www.sensei-conversation.eu).

• Affective Behavioral Signals Recognition Systems: Designed and developed emotion recognizer as a part of emotion analytics system. Our study mainly focused on understanding whether the agent is empathic or not while client is angry or frustrated.

• Personality Trait Recognition Systems: Designed and developed Personality Trait Recognition Systems in domains such as broad-cast news, human-human conversation and social-media (i.e., facebook, youtube) by utilizing acoustic, linguistic and psycholinguistic information with machine learning algorithms.

• Open Source Tools (e.g., Personality traits scorer, LOSO-split, LIWC-web-client using Java and Python).

• Research Intern, HLT Unit, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-irst), Trento, Italy. June 2011 – October 2011.

• Designed Named Entity Recognition System for broadcast news transcription, which also works for newspaper text.

• Participated in the Evalita-2011 evaluation campaign where my work ranked as a best system.

Research Fellow, Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing (CRBLP), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BRAC University. September 2010 to September 2012.

• Coordinated with CRBLP members to develop unit selection based Bangla TTS system.

Research Programmer, Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing (CRBLP), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BRAC University. September 2006 to July 2010.

• Developed the first Bangla Text to Speech system.

• Contributed to other projects: Pronunciation dictionary, Wordnet, Lexicon, Speech Corpora, etc. Most of these projects were funded by International Development Research Center (IDRC) of Canada under its PAN Localization Network (PanL10n) program.

• Contributed to the Microsoft localization (Windows-Vista and Office-2007 interface) project.

Professional Development

• Attended Sixth Machine Translation Marathon, Trento, Italy, September 5th-10th, 2011.

• Attended in Blizzard Challenge 2011 workshop, Turin, Italy, September 2nd, 2011.

• Participated in International Workshop on Spoken Language Prosody (IWSLPR-09) organized by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Kolkata, India, November 25 – 27, 2009.

• Participated in 4th summer school of ADD (Asian Applied Natural Language Processing for Linguistics Diversity and Language Resource Development) organized by NECTEC Academy, 539/2 Mahanakorn Gypsum Building 21F, February 23 – 27, 2009. [Full financed by ADD]

• Participated in summer school on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text Miningheld at IIT Kharagpur, India, June 24 - June 30, 2008.

• Participated in 3rd summer school of ADD (Asian Applied Natural Language Processing for Linguistics Diversity and Language Resource Development) organized by TCL in Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology (SIIT), Pathumthani, Thailand, February 25 - March 2, 2008 [Full financed by ADD].

• Participated in Summer School in Asian Language Processing, PAN Localization Project, Lahore, Pakistan. June – August 2006. Completed five graduate courses on NLP such as Phonetics & Phonology, Syntax & Morphology, Script Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing. Summer 2006.