I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Information Studies at McGill University. Before that, I completed my PhD of Computer Science at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. I received a Masters of Computing Sciences in Software Engineering from the University of Imperial College London. My research interests include: information retrieval, social media analysis, machine learning, misinformation, and accessibility for older adults. More specifically, I am interested in the research question of how search and social media interactions effect the human behavior in the health-related decision-making process. Currently, I am working on designing solutions to help older adults fight COVID-19 misinformation. I have well-established research track record with notable conference publications (such as ACM CSCW, ACM CHIIR, and ACM ICTIR). I further served as program committee member and reviewer for top-tier conferences and journals (such as JMIR, ACM CSCW, and ACM WWW).

News and Highlights

  • 2020.10.01: Program Committee Member in the TheWebConf 2021
  • 2020.08.13: My talk during the online ACM SIGIR CHIIR Conference about "A Think-Aloud Study about Medical Misinformation in Search Results" is now available online here.
  • 2020.08.10: Received the prestigious AGE-WELL Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Award in Technology and Aging [acceptance rate: 15%]
  • 2020.08.09: Reviewer for the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR)
  • 2020.03.02: Presenting a talk about "Designing systems to better address the problem of misinformation" at the Women in Data Science Conference 2020 WiDS@Ottawa.
  • 2020.02.18: Presenting a talk about: "A Think-Aloud Study to Understand Factors Affecting Online Health Search" at the School of Information Studies, McGill University.
  • 2019.12.15: Our paper: A Think-Aloud Study about Medical Misinformation in Search Results has been accepted to be presented in the ACM SIGIR CHIIR Conference , 14–18 March, 2020. Vancouver, Canada.
  • 2019.11.01: Successfully defended my PhD thesis under the title "Health Misinformation in Search and Social Media"
  • 2019.06.06: Our workshop paper: A Think-Aloud Study about Medical Misinformation in Search Results has been accepted to be presented in the Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation Exposure - ROME 2019 Colocated with ACM SIGIR 2019 conference, July 25, 2019. Paris, France.
  • 2019.01.17: Member of the Program Review Committee for the ACM Digital Health'19, to be held on April 20-23, 2019 in Marseille, France
  • 2018.10.22: Presented a guest lecture in the CS886 Topics in AI: Trust and Online Social Networks course taught by Dr. Robin Cohen in Waterloo University.
  • 2018.08.09: Our paper Fake Cures: User-centric Modeling of Health Misinformation in Social Media has been accepted to be presented in the ACM CSCW'18 conference, November 3rd-7th, 2018 New York City's Hudson River (Jersey City).
  • 2018.04.07: Our research about health misinformation in search engines has been picked up and published in CBC NEWS. Check out the full article here.
  • 2018.04.05: Global News - Edmonton interviewed me about the recent research my colleagues conducted on health misinformation in search results. Check out the broadcast here.
  • 2018.03.28: "Cheriton School of Computer Science" published an article about the work my colleagues and I conducted on health misinformation in search results.
  • 2018.02.01: Started an exciting internship opportunity as a data scientist @ Thomson Reuters Labs, Waterloo. Canada
  • 2018.01.01: Member of the Program Review Committee for the ACM Digital Health'18 to be held on April 23-26, 2018 in Lyon, France
  • 2017.12.06: Presented my PhD research during a research collaboration meeting between Google, Inc. (Mountain View, CA, USA) & the University of Waterloo
  • 2017.11.24: Successfully passed the Cheriton School of Computer Science Comprehensive Examination II. Now, I am officially a PhD candidate!
  • 2017.08.09: Member of the Program Review Committee for the "Journalism, Misinformation and Fact Checking" alternate track at the 27th World Wide Web Conference (WWW), to be held on April 23-27, 2018 in Lyon, France
  • 2017.06.27: Our paper Catching Zika Fever: Application of Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning for Tracking Health Misinformation on Twitter has been accepted to be presented in the IEEE ICHI'17 conference, 23-26 August 2017. Utah, USA
  • 2017.06.09: Our paper The Positive and Negative Influence of Search Results on People's Decisions about the Efficacy of Medical Treatments has been accepted to be presented in the ACM ICTIR'17 conference, 1-4 October 2017. Amsterdam
  • 2017.04.11: My Doctoral Consortium about Health misinformation in search and social media has been accepted to be presented in the SIGIR'17 conference, 7-11 August. Tokyo. Japan
  • 2017.04.06: My PhD track paper has been accepted to be published in the ACM Digital Health'17 conference, 2-5 July. London. UK
  • 2017.03.22: Completed the requirements for the Fundamentals of University Teaching Certificate.
  • 2017.03.16: Selected to participate in the Summer School Series on Methods for Computational Social Science. Sardinia, Italy. [Acceptance rate: 32%]