Agha Ali Raza

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Dr. Agha Ali Raza is a Fulbright scholar who received his Ph.D. in Computer Science with a specialization in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, which ranks among the top Computer Science universities in the United States. He has 19 years of experience as a teacher and researcher spanning prestigious organizations, including FAST-NU, Lahore, the Information Technology University, Punjab, and LUMS. His research focuses on Speech & Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), and Technologies for Emerging Markets. The goal of his research and work is to help foster an accessible, inclusive, equitable, and safe digital world where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. He aims to enable information access and connectivity for under-connected, under-served, and offline populations (low-literate, low-income, tech naïve, visually impaired, linguistically/socially marginalized, geographically remote communities, and oral cultures). To this end, he has developed and deployed novel and innovative products, software, and services. These include a viral speech-based information dissemination platform accessible over basic phones called Polly, a maternal health and vaccination hotline for expectant fathers called Super Abbu, a voice-based social network called Baang, a voice-based survey platform called Sawaal, and a voice-based crowdsourcing platform called Karamad. These inclusive services allow users to interact over phone calls from basic (non-smart) phones. These services have reached over 300,000 low-literate and non-tech-savvy users in Pakistan, India, and West Africa, leading to a significant social, health, and economic impact. They have provided information on maternal health and childcare, COVID-19, Ebola (in West Africa), routine immunization, job opportunities, and weather. His work in Machine Learning and Language Technologies focuses on tailoring and democratizing these technologies for the developing world and resource-constrained settings. He developed the first medium vocabulary speech recognition system for Urdu in 2009, forming the backbone of several speech-to-text and text-to-speech systems for Urdu. He has developed tools, including Urdu text-to-speech, spoken term detection, speech emotion identification, voice biometrics, and audio deepfake detection and techniques, including supervised and unsupervised pruning, to bring the processing of large datasets within moderate computing resources. He also released the first open-type, character-based Urdu Nastaliq web font in collaboration with Mr. Nasrullah Mehr, a famous calligrapher. Dr. Raza has taken a leadership role in training and educational initiatives, recognizing the urgent need to demystify generative AI. He has developed and delivered a comprehensive series of workshops aimed at integrating AI into various professional workflows and providing hands-on training to professionals from various walks of life including leaders (CEOs, CTOs, Vice Chancellors, Deans, and Directors), HR personnel, Academics, Doctors, Civil Servants (grades 18 to 20), and Programmers. Dr. Raza has authored 46 research papers published in peer-reviewed conferences and reputable journals, including CHI – the top publication venue in HCI (7 papers), CACM (IF: 14, 2 papers), InterSpeech – the top conference in speech processing (4 papers), WWW, CSCW, ACL, EMNLP, and COLING. These include eleven CORE-A*, eight CORE-A, and eight journal papers. His novel approach to mass-disseminate instrumental information to low-literate people in Pakistan using entertainment as a hook created a paradigm shift in information services for under-served populations and received the best paper award at CHI. His work on developing a unique method to disseminate maternal health information to expectant parents in developing countries received an Honorable mention at CHI. He has been awarded highly competitive grants by the UNICEF Innovations Fund, GIZ, Facebook/Meta, the Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Academies of Sciences (NAKFI), Google Inc., and the HEC. As a lead PI from the Pakistan side, he has received grants worth USD 1,628,346 (approx. PKR 452 million) from these prestigious organizations. Dr. Raza liberally volunteers his time to serve the local and international community. He is the Program Committee chair for ACM COMPASS 2024. He has been an Associate Chair for CHI since 2019, the short papers PC chair for ICTD 2017, the open session chair for ICTD 2022, and the Associate Editor for the ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies (JCSS). His projects have been featured in prestigious national and international media, including BBC, NPR, MIT Tech Review International, Express Tribune, Dawn News, Geo News, the Times of India, IEEE Signal Processing Society, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Voice of America. Over the last eight years, he has advised two doctoral students, 40 MS students, and 36 Senior Project students.

Bio Focussed on ML and Generative AI

Dr. Agha Ali Raza is a Tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at LUMS, a Mahbub ul Haq Research Center (MHRC) fellow, and a member of the consortium that leads the MS in Artificial Intelligence program at LUMS. 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 the National Centers for Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC) initiative of the government of Pakistan. He is a Fulbright Doctoral Scholar and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science with a specialization in Language Technologies from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, which ranks among the top Computer Science universities in the United States. He has 19 years of experience as a teacher and researcher spanning prestigious organizations, including FAST-NU, Lahore, the Information Technology University, Punjab, and LUMS. He teaches Computer Science courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels, including Machine Learning, Generative AI, Natural Language Processing, and Speech Processing. Dr. Raza’s research focuses on Speech & Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), and Technologies for Emerging Markets. His work in Machine Learning and Language Technologies focuses on tailoring and democratizing these technologies for the developing world and resource-constrained settings. He has developed tools, including Urdu text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems, spoken term detection, speech emotion identification, voice biometrics, and audio deepfake detection and techniques, including supervised and unsupervised pruning, to bring the processing of large datasets within moderate computing resources.

Dr. Raza has taken a leadership role in training and educational initiatives, recognizing the urgent need to demystify generative AI, especially following OpenAI's unveiling of ChatGPT and subsequent technological advancements. He has developed and delivered a comprehensive series of workshops aimed at integrating AI into various professional workflows and providing hands-on training to professionals from various walks of life, enabling them to utilize Generative AI tools, including ChatGPT, Gemini, DALLE, and others, to improve their productivity. These workshops also aim to sensitize the audience to the affordances and limitations of AI and ethical considerations around AI usage. Dr. Raza has successfully conducted training for professionals from various walks of life including leaders (CEOs, CTOs, Vice Chancellors, Deans, and Directors), Human Resource personnel (Managers, HR officers), Faculties and Staff (Sciences, Technology, Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, Education, and Law), Doctors and medical professionals, Civil Servants, Programmers and developers, and students of various backgrounds. Through these workshops, Dr. Raza has trained 115 faculty members, 98 staff members, 31 PhD students, 31 LUMS leaders, and more than 100 professionals beyond LUMS. These efforts have fostered an environment of proactive engagement with AI and set a benchmark for interdisciplinary professional development.

Dr. Raza has been awarded highly competitive grants by the UNICEF Innovations Fund, GIZ, Facebook/Meta, the Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Academies of Sciences (NAKFI), Google Inc., and the HEC. As a lead PI from the Pakistan side, he has received grants worth USD 1,628,346 (approx. PKR 452 million) from these prestigious organizations. His projects have been featured in prestigious national and international media, including BBC, NPR, MIT Tech Review International, Express Tribune, Dawn News, Geo News, the Times of India, IEEE Signal Processing Society, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Voice of America. He is the recipient of the prestigious Vice Chancellor's Teaching Excellence Award at LUMS and the 2024 Alumni Acievement award from FAST NU Lahore.

Detailed Bio with Links

Dr. Agha Ali Raza is a Tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at LUMS, a Mahbub ul Haq Research Center (MHRC) fellow, and a member of the consortium of experts that leads the MS in Artificial Intelligence program. He is the founding director of the Center for Speech and Language Technologies (CSaLT) and the Principle Investigator of the Crime Investigation and Prevention Lab (CIPL) under the National Centers of Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC) initiative of the government of Pakistan. He is a Fulbright Doctoral Scholar and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science with a specialization in Language Technologies from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. His cumulative experience as part of the Computer Science faculty at FAST-NU, ITU, and LUMS spans nineteen years. He teaches Computer Science courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels, including Machine Learning, Generative AI, Natural Language Processing, and Speech Processing. Dr. Raza works to help foster an accessible, inclusive, equitable, and safe digital world where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. His research interests span Speech and Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Speech-based Human-Computer Interfaces, and Information & Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D).

Dr. Raza aims to enable information access and connectivity for under-connected, under-served, and offline populations (low-literate, low-income, tech naive, visually impaired, linguistically/socially marginalized, geographically remote communities, and oral cultures -- link to TEDx talk). To this end, he has developed and deployed novel systems and services. These services include a viral speech-based information dissemination platform accessible over basic phones called Polly, a maternal health and vaccination hotline for expectant fathers called Super Abbu, a voice-based social network called Baang, a voice-based survey platform called Sawaal, and a voice-based crowd-sourcing platform called Karamad. These inclusive services allow users to interact over phone calls from basic (non-smart) phones. These services have reached over 300,000 low-literate and non-tech-savvy users in Pakistan, India, and West Africa. They have provided instrumental information on maternal health and childcare, COVID-19, Ebola (in West Africa), routine immunization, job opportunities, and weather. His work in ML and Language Technologies focuses on tailoring and democratizing these technologies for the developing world and resource-constrained settings. He developed the first medium vocabulary speech recognition system for Urdu in 2009. He also developed tools, including Urdu text-to-speech, spoken term detection, speech emotion identification, voice biometrics, and audio deepfake detection (1, 2, 3) and techniques, including supervised and unsupervised pruning(1, 2), to bring large datasets within the computational reach of moderate computing resources. He also released the first open-type, character-based Urdu Nastaliq web font in collaboration with Mr. Nasrullah Mehr, a famous calligrapher. His work on the nexus of ML and Social Good ensures safe and ethical technologies by proactively identifying and mitigating the social impact of potential harms like misinformation and deepfakes, especially among tech-naive and low digital literacy populations. He draws on methods from various disciplines, including mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative), user studies, surveys and focus groups, RCTs, and participant observations.

Dr. Raza has authored 44 research papers (30 post-Ph.D.) published in peer-reviewed conferences and reputable journals, including CHI - the top publication venue in HCI (7 papers), CACM (IF: 14, 2 papers), InterSpeech - the top conference in speech processing (4 papers), WWW, CSCW, and COLING. These include nine CORE-A*, eight CORE-A, and eight journal papers. His novel approach to mass-disseminate instrumental information to low-literate people in Pakistan using entertainment as a hook created a paradigm shift in information services for under-served populations and received the best paper award at CHI. His work on developing a unique method to disseminate maternal health information to expectant parents in developing countries received an Honorable mention at CHI. His students and RAs have co-authored several of these publications. He has been awarded highly competitive grants by the UNICEF Innovations Fund, GIZ, Facebook/Meta, the Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Academies of Sciences (NAKFI), Google Inc., and the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. As a lead PI from Pakistan, he has received grants worth USD 1,574,500 from these prestigious organizations. He has been an Associate Chair for CHI since 2019, the short papers PC chair for ICTD 2017, the open session chair for ICTD 2022, and the Associate Editor for the ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies (JCSS).

Dr. Raza aims to democratize knowledge. To this end, he has made his ML, Speech Processing, and Computing Fundamentals courses public, which have been watched more than 90,000 times with notes of thanks from eager learners. He has recorded Physics and Mathematics lectures for eighth graders with the Punjab E-learn project. With Edkasa (an education technology startup) and TikTok, he co-developed educational videos aimed at helping students prepare for their exams. The campaign, dubbed #examready, has been a massive success, with TikTok users watching the videos over 750 million times and over 100,000 videos created with the #examready hashtag. He has also developed an online Machine Learning course with LUMSx, the distance learning wing of LUMS, to be released over the Summer of 2023.

Dr. Raza has strong research collaborations with CMU, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, ICSI, the University of Cape Town, the Universities of California - Davis and Riverside, and Cornell. He regularly gets invited to deliver guest lectures and keynote addresses at prestigious venues, including Meta, Google Inc., YouTube, Microsoft Research India (MSRI), NYU - Abu Dhabi, CMU - Qatar, and the UNESCO Chair in Tech4Dev at EPFL. He has delivered guest lectures at Cornell University, Lorentz Center, University of Maryland, Tufts, University of California - Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. Recently he has been conducting workshops and talks to spread awareness about Large Language Models (LLMs), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and ChatGPT and the tremendous potential of such technology to transform our lives and society (link). He has also been delivering talks to sensitize the community to the need for responsible AI and the risks of technology, including misinformation and deep fakes. His projects have been featured in prestigious national and international media, including BBC, NPR, MIT Tech Review International, Express Tribune, Dawn News, Geo News, The Times of India, IEEE Signal Processing Society, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Voice of America.

Website: http://aghaaliraza.com

Last updated: May 2024