I am an Applied Scientist at Microsoft (MSAI) in Seattle, USA. I work on graph representation learning, large language models, natural language processing (NLP), and Responsible AI.

In 2020, I completed my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, under Pascal Poupart's supervision in the Artificial Intelligence lab. I did research and engineering work at the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, in collaboration with Huawei and ProNavigator. I have also been affiliated with Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Previously, I received a Masters of Mathematics in Combinatorics & Optimization from the University of Waterloo. My masters research was in Graph Theory. Before that, I completed my Bachelors of Science (Honours) degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Here is my CV here (last updated: May 2021).

News

  • 15 Dec 2021: Serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Special Issue on Affective Speech and Language Synthesis, Generation, and Conversion.
  • 26 Apr 2021: Our paper on "Emotion Alignment in Neural Dialogue Generation" got accepted at the NeuCAIR Workshop @ ICLR 2021.
  • 01 Jan 2021: Serving on the Program Committees for NAACL 2021 and ACL-IJCNLP 2021.
  • 14 Aug 2020: Serving on the Program Committee for AAAI 2021.
  • 07 Jun 2020: Serving on the Program Committees for EMNLP 2020 and AACL-IJCNLP 2020.
  • 11 May 2020: Joined Microsoft as an Applied Scientist.
  • 17 Apr 2020: I'm one of the fact checkers helping the judges of the Leaders Prize: Fact or or Fake News competition.
  • 15 Mar 2020: Serving as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.
  • 07 Mar 2020: Our paper Generating Emotionally Aligned Responses in Neural Dialogue Systems using Affect Control Theory is up on ArXiv.
  • 10 Dec 2019: Our paper Progressive Memory Banks for Incremental Domain Adaptation has been accepted at ICLR 2020.
  • 27 Nov 2019: Successfully defended my PhD! Here's my thesis.
  • 06 Sep 2019: Presenting a poster on my research at the West Coast NLP Summit, at Facebook, Menlo Park. Facebook generously provided travel funding.
  • 01 Sep 2019: Serving on the Program Committee for AAAI 2020.
  • 29 Aug 2019: Spoke about NLP for Dialogue Systems at an NLP Workshop hosted by Microsoft Reactor.
  • 21 Aug 2019: Started working as an NLP Engineer at Textio Inc in Seattle, WA.
  • 01 Jun 2019: Presented our paper at ICML Workshop on Adaptive and Multitask Learning, 2019.
  • 24 May 2019: Serving on the Program Committee for EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019.
  • 06 May 2019: Serving as a reviewer for 8th International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2019).
  • 19 Feb 2019: Completed my 3rd (and last) Ph.D. seminar.
  • 14 Dec 2018: Completed my 2nd Ph.D. seminar.
  • 16 Nov 2018: Completed the Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam II.
  • 01 Nov 2018: Our new paper on Progressive Memory Banks for Incremental Domain Adaptation is up on ArXiv.
  • 01 Nov 2018: Serving as a reviewer for Artificial Intelligence Review (Springer).
  • 28 Oct 2018: Member of the Program Committee for the ChatbotML Workshop at IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 2018.
  • 03 Aug 2018: Attended Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning summer school at University of Toronto, organized by Vector Institute and CIFAR. Made many new friends and loved listening to big names like Yoshua Bengio, Richard Sutton, Geoff Hinton, Sergey Levine, Tor Lattimore, Sanjeev Arora, Hugo Larochelle, David Duvenaud, Jimmy Ba, Graham Neubig, Hal Daume III and many more!
  • 16 May 2018: Delivered a guest lecture on "Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Systems" in Pascal Poupart's graduate course on Reinforcement Learning (CS 885). [Slides][Video]
  • 02 May 2018: I've been accepted at the Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning Summer School 2018. Their acceptance rate was 23%!
  • 23 Apr 2018: I have been awarded the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for the year 2018-2019!
  • 05 Feb 2018: ProNavigator's CEO Joseph D'Souza and I delivered a guest lecture on 'Natural Language Understanding for Dialogue Systems' in Pascal Poupart's course on Machine Learning (CS 489) at University of Waterloo.
  • 01 Feb 2018: I have been selected as a Vector Institute Affiliate! Checkout Vector's press-release here.
  • 08 Dec 2017: Our paper on Affective Neural Response Generation has been accepted at the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018), France.
  • 29 Sep 2017: Presented a poster at Cheriton Research Symposium 2017 as a Cheriton Graduate Scholar.
  • 12 Sep 2017: Our new paper on Affective Neural Response Generation is up on ArXiv.
  • 01 Aug 2017: Attending ACL 2017 in Vancouver; presenting a poster at *SEM.
  • 21 July 2017: Completed my first Ph.D. seminar! Two more to go.
  • 25 June 2017: Our paper on Deep Active Learning for Dialogue Generation has been accepted at the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017), Vancouver.
  • 15 June 2017: I have been awarded the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for the year 2017-2018!
  • 01 Mar 2017: I have joined a local FinTech AI startup ProNavigator as a part-time Data Scientist.