I am a part of the team at Comcast Applied AI Research (Washington DC) that develops NLP models for the voice-enabled entertainment operating system, X1. As a senior machine learning researcher, I work on deep neural network based solutions for various problems in Natural Language Processing (NLP). One of the problems I worked on recently is to recognize human intents from multilingual voice queries made through Xfinity Voice Remote control.
Over the last 10 years, I applied concepts of machine learning in various academic research domains, e.g. affective computing, multimodal signal processing, accessibility, human-computer interaction, and behavioral prediction of humans. I developed a causal model guided deep learning architecture for a bias-free prediction of the TED Talk ratings. I invented an unsupervised algorithm to detect repetitive body-movements (Mannerisms) from MoCap signals. I did my Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. My academic advisor was M. Ehsan Hoque who leads the Human-Computer Interaction (ROCHCI) lab at the University of Rochester. During my stay at UofR, I got the chance to collaborate with several great researchers, including Daniel Gildea, Ji Liu, and Gonzalo Mateos.
Highlighted Publications
FairyTED: A Fair Rating Predictor for TED Talk Data, AAAI’20, NY, USA
UR-FUNNY: A Multimodal Language Dataset for Understanding Humor, EMNLP’19, Hong Kong, China
A Causality-Guided Prediction of the TED Talk Ratings from the Speech-Transcripts using Neural Networks, arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.08392
SyntaViz: Visualizing Voice Queries through a Syntax-Driven Hierarchical Ontology, EMNLP’18, Brussels, Belgium, 2018
Awe the Audience: How the Narrative Trajectories Affect Audience Perception in Public Speaking, CHI’18, Montreal, Canada, 2018
AutoManner: An Automated Interface for Making Public Speakers Aware of Their Mannerisms, IUI’16, Sonoma, CA, USA, 2016
Unsupervised Extraction of Human-Interpretable Nonverbal Behavioral Cues in a Public Speaking Scenario, ACMMM’15, Brisbane, Australia, 2015
Automated Prediction of Job Interview Performance: The Role of What You Say and How You Say It, FG’15, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2015.
News and Presentations
| Nov 10th, 2019 | Awesome news! Our FairyTED paper got accepted in AAAI 2020!!! A cool thing about this paper is that no university faculty member is there in the author list 🙂 After reading Judea Pearl’s “The Book of Why”, I realized that neural networks alone can’t do a bias-free and fair prediction. It is important to model the data generating process (possibly using causal models). I tried to convince Rupam, Ankani, and Soumen regarding the importance of the problem and, together, we pulled the paper off. I’m really very proud of this contribution. | |
| Aug 13th, 2019 | Our UR-Funny paper got accepted in EMNLP 2019 | paper |
| Oct 27th, 2018 | I presented in the lab on Judea Pearl’s new book “The Book of Why”. My advisor, Ehsan Hoque tweeted that and Judea Pearl himself commented on that tweet! | Tweet Slides |
| Oct 22nd, 2018 | I’ve successfully defended my PhD thesis | Pictures Slides |
| Aug 6th, 2018 | One of my work during the internship in Comcast Lab is accepted in EMNLP 2018 | Paper |
| April 25, 2018 | I presented our TED Talk work in CHI 2018 | Slides |
| Feb 16, 2018 | I presented Chapter 5 from the Deep Learning book in Lab | Slides |
| Jan 2018 | Our paper got accepted in CHI 2018 | |
| Oct 6th, 2017 | My thesis proposal got accepted | |
| Sep 26, 2017 | Got invited to Brain and Cognitive Science for presenting my work in NSF Research Traineeship Program (NRT) | Slides |
| Aug 10, 2017 | I presented a pyTorch Tutorial in our lab | Slides |
| May 15, 2017 | I am going to work as an intern at the Comcast Applied AI Research Lab this summer | |
| July 24th, 2016 | I was invited for a presentation at RIT for One-Day REU Symposium | Slides |
| Sep 1st, 2016 | AutoManner code is released | Code GUI Code |
| Jan 15th, 2016 | IUI travel grant award approved | |
| Dec 7th, 2015 | Our paper got accepted in IUI 2016 | |
| 15th Sep, 2015 | I got the ACMMM travel grant award 2015 | |
| 4th July, 2015 | Our short paper in ACM Multimedia got accepted | |
| 26th June, 2015 | One item in my bucket list is checked — I met Prof. Gilbert Strang!! | |
| 16th April, 2015 | Our IUI paper (Rhema) is being featured in UoR news and other news: NY Magazine, wxxinews, Engadget, Gizmag, Eurekalert, Entrepreneur, InnovationTrail. | Code |
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