I joined Spotify as a Research Scientist. Previously, I worked at Comcast as a Senior Machine Learning Researcher. At Comcast, I was a part of the team responsible for designing and implementing the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) system for Xfinity voice remote control. I implemented a sequence-to-sequence, pointer-generator-based multilingual neural network that can recognize natural language queries in three different languages (English, French, Spanish) as well as any mix of these languages (e.g. Spanglish). This model was pushed to production.
More generally, my research interest revolves around the applications of machine learning in various domains, e.g. Natural Language Processing, Affective Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, and Behavioral Prediction of humans. Recently, I developed a causality-guided deep learning architecture for a fair, and bias-free prediction of public speaking performance in the TED Talks. This work was published in AAAI 2020. I did my Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. My academic advisor was M. Ehsan Hoque. During my stay at UofR, I got the opportunity to work with several great researchers and reputed professors, including Daniel Gildea, Ji Liu, and Gonzalo Mateos. I am originally from Bangladesh.
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
| Aug 3rd, 2020 | I joined Spotify as a research scientist | |
| Nov 10th, 2019 | Awesome news! Our FairyTED paper got accepted in AAAI 2020!!! 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. | paper |
| 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 |
 |
 |
 |