CV

The PDF version of my CV can be found here.

Education

• Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA (Aug. 2020 – Present)
• MSc. Software Engineering, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh (Jan. 2018 – June 2019)
• BSc. Software Engineering, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh (Jan. 2014 – Dec. 2017)

Research Interests

• Natural Language Processing (i.e., understanding and using LLMs), Text Mining and Recommender Systems

Experience

• Graduate Research Assistant: Aug. 2024 – Present
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
  • Previously: Aug.’20 – May’22, Aug.’22 – May’23
  • Collaborations: IBM- Aug.’20 – May’22 (Topic: NextGen Search), Aug.’22 – May’23 (Topic: AIOps)
  • Advisor: Prof. Kevin C. Chang.
• Con-Instructor: Aug. 2024 – Present
  • Dept. of CS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
  • Course: CS 598: Understanding and Using LLMs
  • Instructor: Prof. Kevin C. Chang
• PhD Student Researcher: Sep. 2022 – Present
  • Co-op of CS@UIUC and eBay Inc., IL, USA
  • Topic: Recommender System
  • Advisor: Prof. Kevin C. Chang.
• Applied Scientist Intern: May 2024 – Aug. 2024
  • Amazon Prime Video & Studios CoreTech, Seattle, WA, USA
  • Topic: LLM in Recommender System
• Graduate Teaching Assistant: Aug. 2023 – Dec. 2023
  • Dept. of CS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
  • Course: STAT 107- Data Science Discovery
  • Supervisors: Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider
• Research Scientist Intern - Artificial Intelligence : May 2023 – Aug. 2023
  • IBM Research – Almaden, San Jose, CA, USA
  • Topic: Conversational AI and Long-form QA
  • Manager: Lucian Popa.
• Software Engineer: Nov. 2019 – Aug. 2020
  • Samsung R&D Institute Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • Duties: Developing Samsung wearable applications in Tizen platform
• Short Course Instructor: Jan. 2018 – Sep. 2019
  • Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • Duties: Instructing short courses named Web Programming, Web design and Office application
• Software Engineer Intern: Jan. 2017 – June 2017
  • Datasoft System Bangladesh Limited, Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • Duties: Developing two in-house automation projects

Awards & Grants

• IIT Academic Excellence Gold Medal Award, 2019
• 2019 IEEE Computer Society Bangladesh Chapter’s Award for Academic & Research Excellence in recognition of Outstanding Research Accomplishments
• Winner in a Human activity recognition challenge called NURSE CARE ACTIVITY RECOGNITION CHALLENGE as a part of HASCA workshop at Ubicomp 2019
• Awarded for IJCAI-AIJ 2019 TRAVEL and ACCESSIBILITY GRANT
• Awarded as the best presenter in an international conference, ICREST 2019
• Awarded as an ICT fellow (2018-19) under ICT Division Bangladesh

Master’s Thesis

• Pritom Saha Akash, ”An Evidential Inter-node Hellinger Distance based Tree Classifier”, Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka, 2019. [pdf]

Undergraduate Projects

• Context Sensitive Bengali Spell Checker (Jul. 2017 - Nov. 2017)
  • A Bengali Spell Checker for detecting and recommending corrections of typographic and contextual errors
  • Developed using Python 3.5 and Django 1.11.2
• Graduate Verification System (Aug. 2017 - Oct. 2017)
  • A web-based system for verification of a graduate
  • Developed using PHP, Laravel and MySQL
• Budget Planning System (Sept. 2016 - Nov. 2016)
  • A web-based system for planning yearly budget of IIT, University of Dhaka
  • Developed using PHP and MySQL
• Home Budget Manager (Feb. 2015 - May 2015)
  • An Android application to set budget and track your earnings-expenses
  • Developed using Java, Android Studio 1.0 and SQLite

Publications

Technical Skills

• Programming: Python, Java, Matlab, C/C++, MySQL, JavaScript, R
• Software and Tools: PyTorch, scikit-learn, Git, LaTex, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Android Studio

Reviewer/Co-Reviewer

• EMNLP’23,24; ACL’23,24; EACL’23, KDD’21,22,23,24; SIGIR’21,22,23,24; CIKIM’21; ICDM’21; WSDM’21