Biography
About
Fulbright scholar, Carnegie Mellon PhD, and Associate Professor at LUMS, working where speech, language, machine learning, and social impact meet.
Short bio, for event organizers
Dr. Agha Ali Raza is a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at LUMS and founding director of the Center for Speech and Language Technologies (CSaLT). A Fulbright scholar with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, he builds speech and language AI for low-resource languages and under-served communities, work that has reached over 300,000 people across Pakistan, India, and West Africa. He leads the Speech & Language Technologies vertical of Pakistan's Gates Foundation-funded National AI Hub, and since 2023 has trained more than 3,000 professionals to use generative AI productively and ethically.
Full biography
Dr. Agha Ali Raza is a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), a Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre fellow, and a member of the consortium that runs the university's MS in Artificial Intelligence. He is the founding director of the Center for Speech and Language Technologies (CSaLT) and the principal investigator of the Crime Investigation and Prevention Lab (CIPL) under Pakistan's National Centers for Big Data and Cloud Computing. A Fulbright Doctoral Scholar, he earned his PhD in Computer Science with a specialization in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Roni Rosenfeld, and brings twenty years of teaching and research experience across FAST-NU, the Information Technology University, and LUMS.
In 2026 he was appointed Speech & Language Technologies Vertical Lead of Pakistan's National AI Hub for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health, a Gates Foundation-funded national initiative. There he is building production-grade automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, machine translation, and medically contextualized large language models for Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, and Pashto, so that lifesaving health information can reach families in the language they actually speak.
His research connects Speech & Natural Language Processing, AI and Machine Learning, and technologies for emerging markets, all in service of a digital world that is accessible, inclusive, equitable, and safe. The guiding insight of his work is that simple entertainment and conversation can carry serious information: by grounding telephone services in fun and sociality, he gives them reasons to spread on their own through communities that are low-literate, low-income, or offline. The voice services he has designed and deployed, including Polly, Super Abbu, Baang, Sawaal, and Karamad, work over basic phone calls without internet or smartphones, and have reached more than 300,000 users while carrying information on maternal health, COVID-19, Ebola, immunization, jobs, and weather.
Alongside these deployments he builds foundational language technology for Urdu and other under-resourced languages. He developed the first medium-vocabulary spontaneous speech-recognition system for Urdu, and the corpora and tools released along the way, from pronunciation-lexicon generation and word segmentation to text simplification, speech-emotion recognition, voice biometrics, and audio deepfake detection, now underpin a great deal of downstream work. To overcome data scarcity, his lab crowdsourced 1,200 hours of spontaneous speech from 11,000 speakers across Urdu and nine regional languages through its own voice platforms. With the calligrapher Nasrullah Mehr he released Mehr-e-Nastaliq, the first calligraphy-based OpenType Urdu Nastaliq web font. His work also tackles the efficiency of AI itself, with supervised and unsupervised data-pruning techniques that bring the processing of large datasets within reach of moderate computing resources.
Dr. Raza has authored 71 publications, including 13 CORE-A* and 9 CORE-A papers, in venues such as CHI, Interspeech, ACL, EMNLP, COLING, WWW, CSCW, Communications of the ACM, Scientific Reports (a Nature Portfolio journal), and the Journal of Development Economics. His work on spreading information to low-literate communities through entertainment received a Best Paper award at ACM CHI, and his work on maternal-health interventions received a CHI Honorable Mention. As lead PI on the Pakistan side, he has won highly competitive grants from the UNICEF Innovations Fund, GIZ, Facebook/Meta, the Gates Foundation, the NIH, the National Academies of Sciences (NAKFI), Google, and the HEC.
Convinced that generative AI must be made legible to the people it will affect, he has, since February 2023, led more than 85 training programs that have reached over 3,000 professionals, among them C-suite and executive leaders, vice-chancellors and deans, 300 doctors, 300 faculty and staff, civil servants, and PhD students. Delivered individually and through the LUMS Learning Institute and the Pakistan Society for Training and Development, these programs have served organizations including Mercy Health (USA), Jazz, Engro, Pakistan State Oil, OGDCL, Faysal Bank, and The Citizen's Foundation. He is also co-founder and AI lead of two ventures: ActualAIz, which builds custom AI solutions, and Plus1MD, an AI medical-scribe health-tech startup. He serves the research community as Program Committee co-chair for ACM COMPASS 2024 and a member of its steering committee, an Associate Chair for ACM CHI since 2019, and an Associate Editor of the ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies. His projects have been featured by the BBC, NPR, MIT Technology Review, the Express Tribune, Dawn, Geo News, the Times of India, the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Voice of America.
Honors & awards
Need this in another length or format? The full record is in the Curriculum Vitae (PDF).