Agha Ali Raza

Service

Academic service

Sustained service to the research community and to the public in HCI, speech, NLP, and computing for development.

Looking for my talks and podcasts? They have their own home on the Talks & media page.

Program committees & editorial service

2024
Program Committee co-chair and steering committee member, ACM COMPASS 2024.
2019–
Associate Chair, ACM CHI (Specific Application Areas), the top HCI conference. External reviewer for CHI since 2015 and for HCI Across Borders since 2016.
ongoing
Associate Editor, ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies (JCSS).
2017
Lead organizer of ICTD 2017, the first time the flagship ICT4D conference was hosted in Pakistan, and PC Chair for short papers and notes. Open Sessions co-chair for ICTD 2022.
since 2015
Technical Program Committee for ICTD and ACM COMPASS (formerly ACM DEV), and for LREC since 2020. Publication Chair and TPC member, Conference on Language & Technology, 2016.
reviewer
ACM DIS, UIST, and CSCW; ACM TALLIP; and journals including Information Processing & Management (Elsevier) and Natural Language Engineering.

University & community service

  • Senior Research Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre, and convener of the committee that designed an inclusive, interdisciplinary MS Data Science program at LUMS.
  • Member of the committee that established the MS in Artificial Intelligence at LUMS, and of the consortium that runs it.
  • Co-established the UNESCO Chair for ICT4D at ITU (2018) with Umar Saif and Amna Raja, and served as acting Director of ITU's Office of Research, Innovation and Commercialization.
  • Member of the Board of Studies, Department of Applied Linguistics, Kinnaird College for Women University, and an MPhil thesis evaluator there.

Public education & outreach

I am committed to making knowledge accessible. For the Punjab E-Learn initiative I recorded Mathematics and Physics lecture series for school students, developing hands-on demonstrations and a "pause-the-video-and-think" method that has become popular with my students. I run AI and machine-learning workshops for school children, sit on school panels about the promise and risks of AI, and have given keynotes on AGI and ChatGPT to school networks. In a collaboration with Edkasa and TikTok, my #examready educational videos were watched over 665 million times, with more than 100,000 videos created under the hashtag.

Physics for school students

Recorded lectures for the Punjab E-Learn initiative, with hands-on demonstrations of everyday physics.

Mathematics for school students

Recorded E-Learn lectures, including a series on areas and volumes for grade 8.

The complete, dated record of talks and service is in the Curriculum Vitae (PDF).