Current Team Members
Ankit Aich
Ankit Aich is a doctoral student who joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at 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.
Mina Valizadeh
Mina Valizadeh is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Tehran in 2018. Her research interests are primarily in natural language processing, with emphases on dialogue management and self-disclosure detection in online health forums.
Mohammad Arvan
Mohammad Arvan is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at 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.
Pardis Ranjbar
Pardis Ranjbar is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests are in detecting self-disclosure and applications of NLP in healthcare.
Shahla Farzana
Shahla Farzana is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at 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.
Usman Shahid
Usman Shahid is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at 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.
Graduate Alumni
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 one new PhD student to start in Fall 2023. 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. If you have specific questions about how your preferred research topic might fit in with ongoing projects or are otherwise curious about UIC’s NLP group, feel free to send me an email (I receive many, many emails every day so please do not feel bad if I miss yours, and feel free to resend). Unfortunately, due to email volume and to protect my current bandwidth for existing students, I am unable to review application materials prior to receiving them directly from our admissions committee, and cannot respond to emails with those materials.
I do not currently have any open, funded positions for the 2022/2023 academic year. If you do not need funding, or if you already have funding from some other source, feel free to read onward! If you do need funding, make sure to check back regularly. If/when additional funded positions become available, I will post the application here.
Graduate
I’m thrilled that you’re interested in working with me! I receive many emails everyday and prioritize responses to my existing advisees, so unfortunately am not able to respond to external meeting requests or questions regarding UIC graduate admissions. 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.
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.
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.