About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Information Systems Department at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), advised by Dr. James Foulds. I am also working as a research assistant in the Foulds Research Group - The Latent Lab.

I was an intern in the wavelet development team at MathWorks Inc., Natick, MA for Summer, 2019. Prior to joining UMBC as a graduate student, I worked in Huawei Technologies (Bangladesh) Ltd. as a Core Network Engineer. Before that, I received my Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, supervised by Prof. Zahid H. Mahmood.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the general area of artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML), particularly in the area of AI/ML Fairness and Ethics. It is now well understood that AI/ML systems, trained on data without due care, often exhibit unfair and discriminatory behavior against certain demographic groups. This phenomenon can have harmful consequences in a variety of AI-automated tasks including college admissions, financial and housing approvals, bail and sentencing decisions, job hiring, and the prioritization of healthcare services. My research is focused on building socially conscious statistical methods for modeling, measuring, and correcting unfairness or implicit bias in machine learning algorithms.

Recent News

• I’ve won 2021 PhD Student Research Award (1st Place) from the Department of Information Systems, UMBC with research topic Debiasing Career Recommendations with Neural Fair Collaborative Filtering.
• I’ve won Best Poster Award in PHD Completed Research category on May 7, 2021. I would like to thank the faculty review panel of IS Poster Day.
• Successfully defended my Ph.D. proposal on May 5, 2021. My sincere thanks to the advisory committee: Dr. James Foulds (Chair/Advisor), Dr. Zhiyuan Chen, Dr. Shimei Pan, Dr. Nirmalya Roy, Dr. Md Osman Gani, and Dr. Edward Raff.
• Presented our work, Debiasing Career Recommendations with Neural Fair Collaborative Filtering, at IS Poster Day, UMBC on April 30, 2021.
• Our AIES 2021 paper, “Can We Obtain Fairness For Free?,” was accepted.
• I have been selected as a recipient of a Student Scholarship Award to attend The Web Conference 2021 (formerly known as WWW). This award will support the cost of my registration.
• Our paper Debiasing Career Recommendations with Neural Fair Collaborative Filtering has been accepted to The Web Conference 2021 (formerly known as WWW).
• Our paper was accepted at SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) 2021. The paper is called Equitable Allocation of Healthcare Resources with Fair Survival Models. Almost all of the reviewers rated the paper as “top 80% of accepted papers at the conference.” Congrats to Kamrun Keya.
• December 2020: Awarded Master of Science in Information Systems from UMBC.
• Our paper on equitable allocation of healthcare resources with fair Cox models was accepted at AAAI/FSS-2020 Artificial Intelligence in Government and Public Sector track. Congrats to Kamrun Keya.
• Our paper, Fair Heterogeneous Network Embeddings, was accepted at 15th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2021).
• Our extended abstract paper on the user study for fair recommender systems was accepted at 8th Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL 2020).
• Our differential fairness paper titled An Intersectional Definition of Fairness was accepted at 36th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2020). Here is the link to the Dr. Foulds’ Talk Video and Slides.
• Our paper titled Bayesian Modeling of Intersectional Fairness: The Variance of Bias was accepted at SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2020).

Honors and Awards

• 2021 PhD Student Research Award (1st Place) from the Department of Information Systems, UMBC
• Best Poster Award in PHD Completed Research category at IS Poster Day, UMBC, 2021
• Student Scholarship Award to attend The Web Conference 2021 (formerly known as WWW)
• GSA Professional Development Grant and IS Dept. Travel Grant to attend NAACL 2019
• NST Fellowship 2014 for M.S. thesis from Ministry of Science and Technology, Bangladesh

Academic Services

• Reviewer: NeurIPS 2021, ICML 2020, ICTAI 2020.

Older News

• Attended The Promise and the Risk of the AI Revolution Conference, U.S. Naval Academy, MD on October, 2019.
• Attended 37th Annual NAJIS Conference 2019 on October, 2019.
• Code for calculating our differential fairness metric is now available in the AI Fairness 360 toolkit from IBM Research! [Github page]
• Our submission to the NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on Machine Learning with Guarantees was accepted!
• Our submission to the KDD 2019 Social Impact Track, on mitigating bias in social-media based recommender systems, was accepted for oral presentation!
• Attended NAACL 2019, Minneapolis MN on June 3 – June 5, 2019.
• I have accepted an intern position at MathWorks Inc., beginning Summer 2019.
• My paper, “Scalable collapsed inference for high-dimensional topic models” to scale up topic models to 10,000 topics with a single machine, was accepted at 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2019)!
• My extended abstact paper on stochastic topic model was accepted at the Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL 2018).
• Joined in the Foulds Research Group on Spring 2018 as a graduate research assistant