Usman Shahid
Hi!
I am a Ph.D. student at UIC studying multimodal machine learning. Specifically, I am working towards developing methods that improve knowledge transfer between modalities (co-learning, cross-modal transfer, etc.)
Previously, I have 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.
Work Experience
Research Assistant
Doing my thesis research with Dr. Natalie Parde on multi-modal learning, specifically cross-modal transfer learning and co-learning. Previously, I have worked on medical notes parsing and media bias.
Applied Science Intern
Interned with the Estimated Defect Modeling (EDM) team at Alexa AI. My work entailed building and evaluating neural multi-modal models to automatically identify which component of Alexa failed during a customer interaction.
Research Assistant
Conducted research with Dr. Elena Zheleva on model dependence in causal inference from observational network data. In addition to that, I worked on automated moral frame detection in news media.
Research Assistant
Besides doing research work on intrinsic plagiarism & content spam detection, media analytics and event mining, I helped create a generic system for visualizing tabular data called Statistan and created an NLP pipeline for automatically annotating news articles called Moodistan.
Research Associate
Conducted research on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and helped develop tools (VillageApps & SpeakMyText) to facilitate underprivileged communities.