Natalie Parde

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Lab members standing next to each other and smiling on the UIC campus.



Current Team Members




Ankit Aich

Ankit Aich

Ankit Aich is a doctoral student who joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago in Spring 2020. Prior to this, he was pursuing his PhD at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY. He completed his bachelor's degree in Information Technology in 2018. His interests lie in figurative language and computational social science.

https://ankitaich.com





Mohammad Arvan

Mohammad Arvan

Mohammad Arvan is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). His main research interests are in the areas of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). Mohammad is particularly focused on reducing the computational costs of neural models in language modeling and sequence transduction tasks.

https://mo-arvan.github.io





Pardis Ranjbar

Pardis Ranjbar

Pardis Ranjbar is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research interests are in detecting self-disclosure and applications of NLP in healthcare.




Shahla Farzana

Shahla Farzana

Shahla Farzana is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. She received her bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2015. Her research interests lie at the intersection of natural language processing, human computer interaction, and interactive interface design.




Souvik Bhattacharya

Souvik Bhattacharya

Souvik Bhattacharya is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. Prior to this, he completed his master's degree (with a thesis) in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Chicago. His research interests are in misinformation detection and in the intersection of language with other modalities.

souvikb.com/




Usman Shahid

Usman Shahid

Usman Shahid is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research interests are in multimodal machine learning, specifically he is interested in developing methods that improve the transfer of knowledge between modalities (co-learning, cross-modal transfer).

Previously, he has worked on failure point detection in large scale dialogue systems, frame analysis, causal inference, plagiarism & content spam detection, affective image analysis, sentiment analysis, media analytics, event extraction and ICTD.

https://www.usmanshahid.com/

Graduate Alumni

Mina Valizadeh (Spring 2023)
  • Ph.D. Dissertation: Identifying Medical Self-Disclosure in Online Platforms

 


 

Souvik Bhattacharya (Spring 2023)
  • M.S. Thesis: Towards Understanding the State of Modern Misinformation Detection
Edoardo Stoppa (Fall 2022)
  • M.S. Thesis: GraDD: A Graph Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Approach to Automatic Dementia Detection
Ashwin Deshpande (Spring 2022)
  • M.S. Project: Conversational Recommender Systems Using Multi-Relational Data
Charic Farinango Cuervo (Fall 2021)
  • M.S. Project: Identification of Misogynous Memes through Natural Language Supervision and Multimodal Learning
Philip Hossu (Spring 2021)
  • M.S. Project: Investigating Sentiment Patterns and Other Trends in Financial Publications During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Yatri Modi (Spring 2020)
  • M.S. Thesis: Towards an Improved Model for Visual Storytelling
Alberto Bellini (Fall 2019)
  • M.S. Thesis: Towards Open-Ended VQA Models using Transformers
Flavio Di Palo (Fall 2019)
  • M.S. Thesis: Detecting Dementia from Patients’ Conversational Transcripts: A Neural Network Approach

 


 

Prospective Team Members

I will be recruiting a new PhD student to start in 2024. If you’re interested in working with my group on a topic pertaining to creative language, multimodal NLP, or healthcare applications, please list me as a potential advisor in your research statement when applying to UIC! This will make it easy for admissions to flag your application for me (and other NLP faculty) to review. Due to email volume and to protect my current bandwidth for existing students, I am unable to review application materials prior to this, and I cannot respond to emails with those materials. I’d recommend checking out the requirements here, or emailing our excellent CS staff at cs-grad@uic.edu for more information about how to join UIC’s Department of Computer Science.

  

What do I look for in applications from prospective PhD students? I’m often asked what I’m looking for in applications from prospective PhD students, and I’m happy to provide additional transparency regarding this! Things that I tend to prioritize most in applications are:

  • Research Fit. I’m especially looking for team members with interests that align with my own research agenda, or that fill existing gaps in my research group. My favorite research topics are creative language (for example, processing and understanding metaphor), multimodality (for example, grounded dialogue with robots), and healthcare applications (for example, recognizing cognitive decline from spoken language).
  • Writing Skills. I like to collaborate with strong writers, as evidenced by standardized test scores or other writing samples (including your statement of purpose!).
  • Creativity and Independence. I like working with people who prefer proposing and pursuing their own ideas. To that end, I like research meetings to feel collaborative (where we discuss your ideas and I provide high-level feedback) rather than hierarchical (where I tell you what to do).

  

On a philosophical level, I tend to view natural language processing as a way to better understand language and various facets of society. I tend to avoid working on problems that are primarily focused on machine learning fundamentals, and I like to work with researchers who genuinely enjoy language and linguistics. I’m happy to work with people who do not have formal training in computer science, but note that I (and my students) are housed in UIC’s Department of Computer Science. If your undergraduate degree was not in CS, you will be required by the department to take certain undergraduate CS classes upon admission and prior to beginning full graduate-level coursework. You will also be expected to know how to develop code to implement your approaches, use popular machine learning and deep learning libraries to train and evaluate models, and have the requisite systems programming expertise to interact with and debug issues that arise in remote server environments.

 

Graduate

If you’re a current or admitted UIC graduate student, or if you have already submitted your application to UIC’s PhD program, feel free to fill out the following form: https://forms.gle/NtFCvHXvi8gH7Y2h6. I review responses regularly, and will contact you for more information if I have a role that matches your interests. I’m always looking for creative, self-motivated researchers to join my team, but availability of certain positions may be restricted depending on lab capacity or funding needs.

 

I do not currently have any open, funded positions for Summer or Fall 2023. If/when additional funded positions become available, I will post the application here.

 

Undergraduate

If you are interested in working with me on a volunteer basis, for course credit, or for a capstone project, feel free to fill out the following form: https://forms.gle/tUQDQtYbhL8t9g118. I enjoy working with undergrads and have worked with many on past or current research projects. Note that I require a minimum time commitment of 10 hours per week for all undergraduate researchers, and availability of these positions may be restricted depending on lab capacity to protect bandwidth for existing advisees.

 

Visiting

At this time I do not have any short-term positions available for non-UIC students. If you are interested in working with me in a more permanent capacity sometime in the future, please apply to UIC directly and fill out the relevant form listed above once you’ve submitted your application to ensure that you are considered for available positions once you are admitted.