I hold a PhD from the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. The Melbourne Research Scholarship fully funded my PhD. My thesis focused on designing advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, with key disciplines including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Pattern Recognition, Deep Learning, and Information Systems for sustainable systems and the public good.
Here's a link to my Google Scholar profile. (h-index: 12)
I maintain a list of my publications (journal/conference articles, book chapters, preprints, datasets) here.
Announcements 📣
- Dec 2024 - Started as a Research Assistant (System Developer) at the School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne.
- Dec 2024 - My PhD thesis, "Advanced Computational Methods for Processing Crisis-Related Social Media Texts," is now publicly available through the University of Melbourne’s institutional repository. The thesis features contributions from designing novel methods and frameworks to creating domain-specific large language models.
- Oct 2024 - I've submitted my PhD thesis to the University of Melbourne.
- Aug 2024 - Paper "CReMa: Crisis Response through Computational Identification and Matching of Cross-Lingual Requests and Offers Shared on Social Media" accepted to IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems.
- May 2024 - Attended and presented at ISCRAM 2024 @ Muenster, Germany.
- May 2024 - Paper "CrisisTransformers: Pre-trained language models and sentence encoders for crisis-related social media texts" accepted to Knowledge-Based Systems.
- Mar 2024 - PhD Completion seminar completed.
- Mar 2024 - Paper "Semantically Enriched Cross-Lingual Sentence Embeddings for Crisis-related Social Media Texts" accepted to ISCRAM 2024.
- May 2023 - Attended and presented at ISCRAM 2023 @ Omaha, Nebraska, United States.
- May 2023 - Paper "BillionCOV: An enriched billion-scale collection of COVID-19 tweets for efficient hydration" accepted to Data in Brief.
- Feb 2023 - Paper "A Twitter narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia" accepted to ISCRAM 2023.
- Dec 2022 - Paper presented at 2022 IEEE BigData. (virtually)
- Dec 2022 - Paper "Where did you tweet from? Inferring the origin locations of tweets based on contextual information" accepted to IEEE Big Data.
- Nov 2022 - Paper "Addressing the location A/B problem on Twitter: the next generation location inference research" presented at ACM SIGSPATIAL LocalRec.
- Aug 2022 - Paper "Twitter conversations predict the daily confirmed COVID-19 cases" accepted to Applied Soft Computing.
- Oct 2022 - Received CS Research Artefacts Grant from the University of Melbourne.
- May 2022 - Nominated by the University of Melbourne as one of two researchers for the Google PhD Fellowship.
- Mar 2022 - Paper "Socially Enhanced Situation Awareness from Microblogs Using Artificial Intelligence: A Survey" accepted to ACM Computing Surveys.
- Apr 2021 - Started PhD (Computer Science) at the University of Melbourne. Supported by the Melbourne Research Scholarship.
Media coverage 🗞️
- "Discover" magazine (5+ million subscribers) mentions our research, "Twitter Conversations Predict the Daily Confirmed COVID-19 Cases," published in Applied Soft Computing, in their article, "Social Media and Search Engines Can Now Forecast Disease Outbreaks."
- "IEEE Transmitter" discusses my large-scale data collection in their article "3 Amazing Research Projects Happening on IEEE DataPort."
- NYU News Release: A study that used GeoCov19Tweets dataset showed that social media sentiment can possibly help predict future vaccination rates.
- "TechPana" (950k subscribers; A leading technology news portal from Nepal) features my work on analyzing social media posts.
Global Impact with billion-scale datasets 🌏
I created and maintained one of the largest datasets of COVID-19-related public discourse, curated and updated daily for 3 years, with 2.2 billion tweet identifiers released under a Creative Commons License. Hosted on IEEE DataPort, it (and its versions) won IEEE Data Competitions in 2019 and 2020 and has been accessed 200,000+ times and cited in 300+ academic papers.Grants 🏆
- Post-PhD studentships (2024–2025), The University of Melbourne, Australia.
- Melbourne Research Scholarship (2021–2024, for PhD study). The University of Melbourne, Australia.
- Travel grant to present a CoRe research article at ISCRAM 2024. The University of Melbourne, Australia.
- Travel grant to present a CoRe research article at ISCRAM 2023. The University of Melbourne, Australia.
- CS Research Artefacts Grant (2022). School of Computing and Information Systems. The University of Melbourne, Australia.
- Infrastructure credits 2020–2023 as a part of Hollie’s Hub for Good program. By Digital Ocean. New York, United States.
- Honorariums and allowances (2018-2019). Special Centre for Disaster Research, New Delhi, India.
- Travel grant to present a research article at WCDM 2019, IIT Bombay, India.
Peer Reviewing 🕵️
I actively serve as a reviewer for leading conferences and journals in Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, and Data Science, such as:
Conferences- WWW (World Wide Web Conference)
- ACM CIKM (Conference on Information and Knowledge Management)
- ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management)
- Artificial Intelligence Review
- ACM Transactions on the Web
- Applied Intelligence
- Knowledge and Information Systems
- Scientific Reports
- Public Opinion Quarterly
- International Journal of Data Science and Analytics
- Online Social Networks and Media
- Journal of Computational Social Science
- Language Resources and Evaluation
- Social Network Analysis and Mining