Hello! I am Rahul Pandey, Ph.D. [CV].

I am an Applied Scientist II at Amazon Advertising. My work primarily focus on building innovative cutting-edge solutions to enhance the advertising experience on the Amazon Product Detail Page.

I finished my Ph.D. in Information Technology in Summer 2023 with a concentration in Information Sciences and Technology. Previously, I finished my undergrad studies in Computer Science from The LNMIIT (Jaipur, India) in 2017.

My research focuses on human-centered computing, therefore, particularly on studying how and where to use human inputs in the various components of AI system design. It lies at the intersection of Applied Machine Learning and Natural Language Understanding to solve human-centered computing problems across humanitarian and crisis informatics domains.

During my Ph.D., I worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at Humanitarian Informatics Lab, School of Computing at George Mason University. My Ph.D. advisor was Dr. Hemant Purohit.

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Recent News

[Dec 2023] Started a full-time position as an Applied Scientist II at Amazon Advertising in Seattle.

[Jul 2023] Working on the Amazon Science team to develop robust speech recognition using reinforcement learning from human/AI feedback.

[Jun 2023] Successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation! (:

[Apr 2023] Finished the pre-defense. Working on the final publication, and finishing up the dissertation thesis.

[Feb 2023] Internship work [link] at Amazon Science [Alexa Speech Team] got accepted in IEEE ICASSP conference (h-5 index: 110). Moreover, the patent of the work is submitted to United States Patent Office (USPTO)

[Jan 2023] Co-authored a book chapter [link] on CitizenHelper in Springer Nature International Handbook of Disaster Research

[Aug 2022] Passed my Ph.D. Proposal Exam, and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy. Presented the future direction of my dissertation research and discussed the proposed outcome of my Ph.D. dissertation

[May 2022] Spending my summers in Seattle at Amazon Science [Alexa Speech team] working on rare word recognition in ASR.

[Apr 2022] Passed my Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam. Got good feedback for future direction of my dissertation research from the committee members.

[Feb 2022] Journal paper [link] of my GRA work of 2020 in collaboration with Dr. Aditya Johri published at Springer Education and Information Technologies (Impact Factor: 3.666).

[Jan 2022] Journal paper [link] of my dissertation research published at Elsevier International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (Impact Factor: 4.866, CiteScore 9.2).

[Oct 2021] Presented my proposed dissertation research [link] at CSCW 2021 Workshop: Investigating and Mitigating Biases in Crowdsourced Data.

[May 2021] Spending my summers remotely at Amazon Science [Alexa Speech team] working on personalization in ASR.

[Aug 2020] Will serve as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for AIT 664: Information: Representation, Processing and Visualization course for the academic year 2020-21.

[Aug 2020] Passed my Ph.D. qualifying exams.

[Jun 2020] Spending my summers remotely at Comcast Applied AI Lab [Corti team] working on applying AI in media tech.

[Nov 2019] Attended the AAAI 2019 Fall Symposium in AI for Social Good. Lots of discussion on Responsible AI and the need of interpretability in AI systems.

[Oct 2019] All the workshops and special session program of IEEE/WIC/ACM Web Intelligence 2019 concluded on October 14th, 2019. Here is the link for the proceedings of all the 12 workshops/special sessions.

[Oct 2019] My internship work at Philips Research North America [Acute Care Solutions team] got accepted at 2019 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (IEEE BIBM 2019) as a workshop paper. We propose a novel performance boosting module for Biomedical Entity Recognition called BoostER.

[Oct 2019] Attended the BDEM Annual Workshop 2019 held in Sogndal, Norway. I had presented our ongoing research on analyzing Web Stream data with focus on ASONAM 2019 modeling error paper and Web Intelligence 2018 ranking paper.

[Sep 2019] Our paper got accepted in AAAI 2019 Fall Symposium Series in AI for Social Good.

[Aug 2019] Attended ASONAM 2019 conference at Canada. This was my first time attending conference outside of USA. I had learnt very much and enjoyed the beautiful places of Vancouver, CA.

[June 2019] One short paper got accepted in ASONAM 2019 conference (Acceptance Rate: 14% <short-paper: 6%>).

[May 2019] Spending my summers at Philips Research North America [Acute Care Solutions team] working on applying AI in Healthtech domain.

[April 2019] One workshop paper got accepted at SmartSys Workshop co-located with SMARTCOMP 2019 conference.

[January 2019] Serving as a Workshop Co-Chair at Web Intelligence 2019 conference.

[January 2019] One full paper got accepted under Tools track at ISCRAM 2019 conference.

[December 2018] Received Best Paper Award for paper “Distributional Semantics Approach to Detect Intent in Twitter Conversations on Sexual Assaults” at Web Intelligence 2018 conference.

[October 2018] Presented our paper at 2018 AAAI FALL SYMPOSIUM SERIES. Thrilled about the ongoing work on bias detection and mitigation at government agencies and also at IBM Research.

[August 2018] Two full paper got accepted in Web Intelligence 2018 conference.

[August 2018] One full paper got accepted in 2018 AAAI FALL SYMPOSIUM SERIES under Artificial Intelligence in Government and Public Sector track.

[July 2018] Attended my first conference SBP-BRiMS 2018. Lots of learning and interacted with great people in the community.

[July 2018] One demo paper co-authored with Prof Purohit got accepted in ASONAM 2018 conference.

[June 2018] One full paper got accepted in ASONAM 2018 conference (Acceptance Rate: 15%).

[May 2018] Continuing my Research Assistantship at HSIL Lab this summer!

[April 2018] Co-authored a book chapter to appear in Emerging Research Challenges and Opportunities in Computational Social Network Analysis and Mining [Link]

[April 2018] Extended Abstract got accepted in IC2S2 2018.

[January 2018] Started my Ph.D. in Information Technology at George Mason University.

[June 2017] Started my first job as a Software Engineer: Data Science at Culture Machine Media (Pune, India). I will be working with both Intelligent Machine team to apply machine learning for improving brand recognition.

[December 2016] Started my semester-long research internship at STARS Lab, INRIA (Sophia Antipolis, France).

[May 2016] Started my internship at a Media-tech startup Culture Machine Media (Pune, India). I will be working with the Video Machine team to automate video generation at scale.

[December 2015] Started working remotely with INMAS Lab, D.R.D.O. (Delhi, India). I am exploring different data visualizations using d3.js.

[May 2015] Started my internship at a computer-vision and robotics-based startup Kritikal Solutions (Noida, India). I will be working on pedestrian detection for ADAS (Automated Driving Assistance Systems).

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