I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Wichita State University, where I lead the Accessible AI (A²I) Lab . My research focuses on making Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science more accessible, usable, and impactful beyond highly technical communities. I work at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), and AI, developing models that enable machines to understand human language with deep semantic and contextual awareness. By exploring how intent, opinion, and emotion are expressed in language, my goal is to build AI systems that are trustworthy, scalable, and beneficial for real-world applications.
Before joining Wichita State, I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Auburn University, where I was fortunate to be advised by Dr. Shubhra Kanti Karmaker (“Santu”) . During my time at Auburn, I was honored with the 100+ Women Strong Outstanding Departmental Annual Graduate Award and Auburn University’s Outstanding Doctoral Student Award. Prior to that, I completed my Master’s in Software Engineering from Jadavpur University.
I have extensive industry experience as an IT Analyst at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), where I worked on Microsoft Office SharePoint server management, Office 365 migrations, and workflow automation to enhance enterprise processes.
| Nov 2025 | My PhD student, Touseef Hasan, received the Dora Wallace Hodgson – Outstanding Doctoral Student Award. |
| Nov 2025 | Our paper “Zero-Shot Multi-Label Classification of Bangla Documents: Large Decoders vs Classic Encoders” was accepted at AACL BLP 2025. |
| Nov 2025 | Our project “Food System Data Acquisition to Support Real-Time Food Navigation using Large Language Models” was funded through the WSU MURPA program. |
| Aug 2025 | Our paper “Benchmarking LLMs on the Semantic Overlap Summarization Task” was accepted at EMNLP 2025. |
| Jun 2025 | The Kansas Health Foundation funded our project “Leveraging AI for Food System Data Acquisition and Inquiry”. |
| Jan 2025 | Our paper “LLMs as Meta-Reviewers’ Assistants: A Case Study” was accepted at NAACL 2025. |
| Dec 2024 | Investigating Annotator Bias in Large Language Models for Hate Speech Detection” was accepted at the NeurIPS 2024 Safe GenAI Workshop. |
| Aug 2024 | I joined the School of Computing at Wichita State University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. |
| Jul 2024 | Successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation "Zero-Shot Multi-Label Topic Inference" at Auburn University. |
| May 2024 | Our paper "Processing Natural Language on Embedded Devices: How Well Do Modern Models Perform?" was accepted at ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE'24). |
| Apr 2024 | Recipient of Auburn University's Outstanding Doctoral Student Award (2024). |
| Nov 2023 | Our paper "Zero-Shot Multi-Label Topic Inference with Sentence Encoders & LLMs" was accepted at EMNLP 2023. |
| Oct 2023 | Awarded the 100+ Women Strong Outstanding Departmental Annual Graduate Award (2023). |
| Jun 2022 | Our paper "Exploring Universal Sentence Encoders for Zero-shot Text Classification" was accepted at AACL-IJCNLP 2022. |
| May 2022 | Our paper "Ad-Hoc Monitoring of COVID-19 Global Research Trends for Well-Informed Policy Making" was published in ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. |
| Apr 2022 | Our paper "Concept Annotation from Users Perspective: A New Challenge" was presented at WWW UserNLP 2022. |
| Mar 2021 | Our paper "COVID19α: Interactive Spatio-Temporal Visualization of COVID-19 Symptoms through Tweet Analysis" was presented at ACM IUI 2021. |
| Mar 2021 | Our paper "Containing COVID-19 Pandemic by Mining Knowledge from Scientific Literature and Social Media" was accepted at ICDATA 2021. |
| Aug 2019 | Started my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Auburn University. |
| Dec 2018 | Completed M.E. in Software Engineering at Jadavpur University. |