About Me
I’m a final year Ph.D. candidate in Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I work with Dr. Nirmalya Roy in the Mobile, Pervasive, and Sensor Computing (MPSC) Lab.
My current research is focused on building scalable machine learning models that are robust against domain and category shifts with minimal-to-no extra label information. To that end, I primarily work on deep unsupervised, self-supervised, adversarial, disentangled/interpretable representation learning & learnable data augmentation techniques. I’m interested in discovering the optimum transferability of the representations between domains, tasks, and modalities.
During summer 2020, I completed an applied scientist internship at Amazon where I improved the latency and robustness of a neural machine translation system under noisy inputs using some of the above ideas. This summer I interned with Audio and Acoustics Research Group in Microsoft Research Redmond to develop non-intrusive multi-task speech quality assessment methods.
Before coming back to graduate school, I have spent around 8 years in the industry building (and later leading teams in developing) distributed & scalable back-ends. Between the years 2009–2013, I was also an active contributor in a few open-source NLP/ML projects through Google Summer of Code program (both as a participant and later in mentoring roles).
Publications
Primary Research Area
- Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Nirmalya Roy. STranGAN: Adversarial Spatial Transformer for Scalable Complex Human Activity Recognition (IEEE/ACM CHASE 2021)
- David Welsh, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, and Nirmalya Roy. Hybrid Distance-Based Framework for Classification of Embedded Firearm Recoil Data. (CoMoReA 2021)
- Avijoy Chakma, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Md Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan, Nirmalya Roy. Activity Recognition in Wearables Using Adversarial Multi-source Domain Adaptation. (IEEE/ACM CHASE 2020)
- Avijoy Chakma, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Nirmalya Roy, H M Sajjad Hossain. Shoot Like Ronaldo: Predict Soccer Penalty Outcome with Wearables (IEEE Wristsense 2020)
- Abu Zaher MD Faridee, Md Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan, Nilavra Pathak, Nirmalya Roy. AugToAct: Scaling Complex Human Activity Recognition with Few Labels (EAI/ACM Mobiquitous 2019)
- Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Sreenivasan Ramasamy Ramamurthy, and Nirmalya Roy. Happyfeet: Challenges in Building an Automated Dance Recognition and Assessment Tool. (ACM Getmobile 2018)
- Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Sreenivasan Ramasamy Ramamurthy, H M Sajjad Hossain, and Nirmalya Roy. HappyFeet: Recognizing and Assessing Dance on the Floor. (ACM HotMobile 2018).
Others
- Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Vandana P. Janeja. Measuring Peer Mentoring Effectiveness in Computing Courses: A Case study in Data Analytics for Cybersecurity. (IEEE EduHiPC - 2019)
- Vandana P. Janeja, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Aryya Gangopadhyay, Carolyn Seaman, Amy Everhart. Enhancing Interest in Cybersecurity Careers: A Peer Mentoring Perspective. (ACM SIGCSE 2018)
- Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Francis M. Tyers. Development of a morphological analyser for Bengali. (FreeRBMT 2009)
Experience
- Research Intern, Microsoft Research Redmond; Summer 2021
- Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon; Summer 2020
- Research Assistant, Mobile, Pervasive & Sensor Computing Lab, UMBC; 2018 - present
- Research Assistant, Data Science (now MData) Lab, UMBC; 2016 - 2018
- Development Team Manager, Appdragon Ltd.; 2014 - 2016
- Senior Software Engineer, Apurba Technologies Inc.; 2011 - 2016
- Research Intern, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), Google Summer of Code; Summer 2012
- Software Engineer, Eyeball Network Inc. (now AnyConnect) ; 2011 - 2012
- Research Intern, Apertium Machine Translation System, Google Summer of Code; Summer 2009 and 2010
- Software Engineer, Structured Data Systems Ltd.; 2008
Education
- Ph.D., Information Systems (AI/ML track), UMBC, 2016 - Present
- M.S., Information Systems (AI/ML track), UMBC, 2016 - 2019
- M.Sc. (incomplete), Computer Science & Engineering, BUET, 2012 - 2013
- B.Sc., Computer Science & Engineering, BUET, 2006 - 2011
Services
- Reviewer, ACM IMWUT (UbiComp); 2021, 2020
- Reviewer, IEEE Percom; 2020, 2019, 2018
- Reviewer, IEEE Smartcomp; 2020, 2019, 2018
- Reviewer, Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal; 2019, 2018
- Local organizer, IEEE SMARTCOMP and IEEE WOWMOM; 2019
- Student TPC Member, IEEE Students’ Workshop on Smart Computing; 2019
- Reviewer, Multidisciplinary Track, IEEE/ACM ASONAM; 2019
- Mentor, Google Summer of Code, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent); 2013
- Mentor, Google Summer of Code, Apertium Machine Translation System; 2011