Dr. Firoj Alam | Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Hamad Bin Khalifa University

FACULTY BIOGRAPHIES

Dr. Firoj Alam

Dr. Firoj Alam


Scientist
Social Computing
Qatar Computing Research Institute

  • Phone445 41582
  • Office locationHBKU Research Complex, 1st Floor

Biography

Dr. Alam has been working more than 10 years in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, which include Deep/machine learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech and Behavioral Signal Processing. He received his PhD with an specialization of Human Language Technology and a particular focus on Behavioral Signal Processing (Empathy, Emotion, Personality traits) from University of Trento, Italy. He has been part of an EU conversation summarization project, SENSEI. (http://www.sensei-conversation.eu), where he has developed spoken conversation summarization system. He has also developed information extraction systems, particularly, Named Entity Recognition and Relation extraction for different domains. Recently, he started working on developing an AI system for social media data to facilitate early responders during disaster events. In his early research carrier he has developed Text to Speech system and other linguistic resources. His research interests include Applied Deep/Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Affective Behavior and Speech Processing. He has more than 40 research papers published in international conferences and journals.

For the latest information please visit: http://www.firojalam.one/

 


Research Interests

  • Machine Learning (Deep Learning)
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Speech Processing
  • Affective Behavioral Signal Processing (Empathy, Emotions, Personality raits) from Speech and Text
  • Social Media Analysis

Experience

Scientist

QCRI, Qatar

Sept-2019 to Present
  • Post-doctoral Researcher

    QCRI, Qatar

    Feb-2017 to Sept-2019
  • Research Associate

    QCRI, Qatar (just update the dates)

    Sept-2016 to Jan-2017
  • Research Associate

    QCRI, Qatar

    Sept-2016 to Present
  • PhD Researcher

    SIS Lab, University of Trento, Italy

    Nov-2011 to Dec-2016
  • Research Intern

    HLT unit, FBK, Italy

    Jun-2011 to Aug-2011
  • Research Programmer

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BRAC University, Bangladesh

    Sept-2006 to Jul-2010

Education

PhD in Computer Science

ICT Doctoral School, University of Trento, Italy

2016
  • Msc

    University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    2011
  • Bsc

    BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

    2007

Selected Publications

  • Firoj Alam, Morena Danieli, Giuseppe Riccardi, Automatic Labeling Affective Scenes in Spoken Conversations.

    In: Klempous R., Nikodem J., Baranyi P. (eds) Cognitive Infocommunications, Theory and Applications. Topics in Intelligent Engineering and Informatics, vol 13. Springer, 2018 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-95996-2_6.

    2018
  • Firoj Alam, Bernardo Magnini, and Roberto Zanoli, Comparing Named Entity Recognition on Transcriptions and Written Texts

    Harmonization and Development of Resources and Tools for Italian Natural Language Processing within the PARLI Project, Vol. 589, Basili, R., Bosco, C., Delmonte, R., Moschitti, A., Simi, M. (Eds.) 2015, Springer.

    2015
  • Firoj Alam, Roberto Zanoli, A Combination of Classifiers for Named Entity Recognition on Transcription

    Evaluation of Natural Language and Speech Tools for Italian, B. Magnini et al. (Eds.), LNCS 7689, Berlin, Springer Verlag, 2013 , pp. 107 - 115.

    2013
  • Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran. Descriptive and Visual Summaries of Disaster Events using Artificial Intelligence Techniques

    Case Studies of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, Journal of Behaviour & Information Technology (Taylor & Francies), 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2019.1610908.

    2019
  • Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran, Processing Social Media Images by Combining Human and Machine Computing During Crises

    International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (IJHCI), 2018, pp 1-17, https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2018.1427831.

    2018
  • Firoj Alam, Morena Danieli, Giuseppe Riccardi, Annotating and Modeling Empathy in Spoken Conversations Computer Speech & Language

    Volume 50, 2018, pp 40-61, ISSN 0885-2308, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2017.12.003.

    2018
  • Firoj Alam, Anna Corazza, Alberto Lavelli and Roberto Zanoli

    A Knowledge-Poor Approach to Chemical-Disease Relation Extraction, The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, 2016 (doi: 10.1093/database/baw071).

    2016
  • Fabio Celli, Arindam Ghosh, Firoj Alam, Giuseppe Riccardi

    In the Mood for Sharing Contents: Emotions, Personality and Interaction Styles in the Diffusion of News, Information Processing & Management, Elsevier, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2015.08.002.

    2016
  • Firoj Alam, Muhammad Imran, Ferda Ofli. CrisisDPS: Crisis Data Processing Services.

    16th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), 2019.

    2019
  • Firoj Alam, Shafiq Joty, Muhammad Imran. Domain Adaptation with Adversarial Training and Graph Embeddings, ACL, 2018, Melbourne, Australia. http://aclweb.org/anthology/P18-1099

    2018
  • Firoj Alam, Shafiq Joty, Muhammad Imran

    Graph Based Semi-supervised Learning with Convolutional Neural Networks to Classify Crisis Related Tweets, International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2018, Stanford, California, USA.

    2018
  • Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli and Muhammad Imran

    CrisisMMD: Multimodal Twitter Datasets from Seven Natural Disasters, International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2018, Stanford, California, USA.

    2018
  • Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran, Michael Aupetit

    A Twitter Tale of Three Hurricanes: Harvey, Irma, and Maria, 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), May 2018, Rochester NY, USA.

    2018
  • Muhammad Imran, Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, Michael Aupetit

    Enabling Rapid Disaster Response Using Artificial Intelligence and Social Media. International Roundtable on the Impacts of Extreme Natural Events: Science and Technology for Mitigation (IRENE) workshop, December 2017, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

    2017
  • Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam, Naira Khan and Sheak Rashed Haider Noori,

    Bangla Grapheme to Phoneme Conversion Using Conditional Random Fields, 20th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT), 2017, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCITECHN.2017.8281780.

    2017
  • Firoj Alam, Muhammad Imran, Ferda Ofli

    Image4Act: Online Social Media Image Processing for Disaster Response, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2017, Sydney, Australia.

    2017
  • Firoj Alam, Muhammad Imran, Ferda Ofli

    Online Social Media Image Processing Using AIDR 2.0: Artificial Intelligence for Digital Response, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, Honolulu, Hawaii.

    2017
  • Dat Tien Nguyen, Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran

    Automatic Image Filtering on Social Networks Using Deep Learning and Perceptual Hashing During Crises, 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management (ISCRAM). 2017 Albi, France.

    2017
  • Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury and Sheak Rashed Haider Noori

    Bidirectional LSTMs - CRFs Networks for Bangla POS Tagging, ICCIT 2016.

    2016
  • Firoj Alam, Fabio Celli, Evgeny A. Stepanov, Arindam Ghosh, Giuseppe Riccardi

    The Social Mood of News: Self-reported Annotations to Design Automatic Mood Detection Systems, Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media, Co-located with COLING 2016, Osaka, Japan, 2016.

    2016
  • Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Morena Danieli, Giuseppe Riccardi

    How Interlocutors Coordinate with each other within Emotional Segments?, COLING 2016, Osaka, Japan, 2016.

    2016
  • Firoj Alam, Morena Danieli, Giuseppe Riccardi

    Can We Detect Speakers’ Empathy?: A Real-Life Case Study, 7th IEEE International Conference Cognitive InfoCommunications, 2016.

    2016
  • Fabio Celli, Giuseppe Riccardi, Firoj Alam

    Multilevel Annotation of Agreement and Disagreement in Italian News Blogs, Proc. LREC, Portroz, 2016.

    2016
  • E. A. Stepanov, B. Favre, F. Alam, S. A. Chowdhury, K. Singla, J. Trione, F. B'echet, G. Riccardi

    Automatic Summarization of Call-center Conversations, IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2015), Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, 2015.

    2015
  • Firoj Alam, Anna Corazza, Alberto Lavelli, and Roberto Zanoli

    A Knowledge-Poor Approach to BioCreative V DNER and CID Tasks, Proceedings of the Fifth BioCreative Challenge Evaluation Workshop, 274-279, 2015.

    2015
  • Morena Danieli, Giuseppe Riccardi, Firoj Alam

    Emotion Unfolding and Affective Scenes: A Case Study in Spoken Conversations, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Emotion Representations and Modeling for Companion Technologies, pp. 5-11, ACM (ICMI), 2015.

    2015
  • Morena Danieli, Giuseppe Riccardi, Firoj Alam

    Annotation of Complex Emotions in Real-Life Dialogues: The Case of Empathy, Clic-it14, 2014.

    2014
  • Firoj Alam, Giuseppe Riccardi

    Predicting Personality Traits using Multimodal Information, Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Multimedia on Workshop on Computational Personality Recognition, pp. 15-18. ACM, 2014, Orlando, USA.

    2014
  • Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Giuseppe Riccardi, Firoj Alam

    Unsupervised Recognition and Clustering of Speech Overlaps in Spoken Conversations, Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia - SLAM, pp. 62-66., 2014.

    2014
  • Firoj Alam, Giuseppe Riccardi

    Fusion of Acoustic, Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Features for Speaker Personality Traits Recognition, ICASSP2014 - Speech and Language Processing (ICASSP2014 - SLTC), 04-09 May 2014, Florence, Italy.

    2014
  • Firoj Alam, Giuseppe Riccardi

    Comparative Study of Speaker Personality Traits Recognition in Conversational and Broadcast News Speech, Interspeech-2013, 25-29 August 2013, Lyon, France.

    2013
  • Firoj Alam, Evgeny A. Stepanov, Giuseppe Riccardi

    Personality Traits Recognition on Social Network - Facebook, WCPR-2013 (ICWSM-13), Cambridge, MA, USA.

    2013
  • Firoj Alam, Named Entity Recognition on Transcription Using Cascaded Classifiers

    EVALITA 2011. In Working Notes of EVALITA 2011, 23-24th January 2012, Rome, Italy, ISSN 2240-5186 (2012).

    2012
  • Firoj Alam, S.M. Murtoza Habib and Mumit Khan

    Bangla Text to Speech using Festival, Conference on Human Language Technology for Development (HLTD 2011), Alexandria, Egypt, 02-05 May, 2011.

    2011
  • S. M. Murtoza Habib, Firoj Alam, Rabia Sultana, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, and Mumit Khan

    Phonetically balanced Bangla speech corpus, Conference on Human Language Technology for Development (HLTD 2011), Alexandria, Egypt, 02-05 May, 2011.

    2011
  • Firoj Alam, S. M. Murtoza Habib, Dil Afroza Sultana and Mumit Khan

    Development of Annotated Bangla Speech Corpora, Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced language (SLTU’10), vol 1, pp-35-41, Penang, Malasia, May 3 - 5, 2010

    2010
  • Firoj Alam, S. M. Murtoza Habib and Professor Mumit Khan

    Text Normalization system for Bangla, Proc. Conference on Language and Technology 2009 (CLT09), NUCES, Lahore, Pakistan, January 22-24, 2009.

    2009
  • Firoj Alam , S. M. Murtoza Habib and Professor Mumit Khan

    Acoustic Analysis of Bangla Consonants, Proc. Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced language (SLTU’08), vol 1, page 108-113, Vietnam, May 5-7, 2008.

    2008
  • Firoj Alam, Promila Kanti Nath and Professor Mumit Khan

    Text To Speech for Bangla Language using Festival, Proc. 1st Intl. Conf. on Digital Comm. and Computer Applications (DCCA 2007), vol 1, pp-853-859, Amman, Jordan, March 19-23, 2007.

    2007
  • Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran. Descriptive and Visual Summaries of Disaster Events using Artificial Intelligence Techniques: Case Studies of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria

    In the Journal of Behaviour & Information Technology (Taylor & Francies), 2019. DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2019.1610908 .

    2019
  • Firoj Alam, Muhammad Imran, Ferda Ofli. CrisisDPS: Crisis Data Processing Services

    In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), 2019, Valencia, Spain.

    2019
  • Firoj Alam, Shafiq Joty, Muhammad Imran. Domain Adaptation with Adversarial Training and Graph Embeddings

    ACL, 2018, Melbourne, Australia.

    2018
  • Firoj Alam , Shafiq Joty, Muhammad Imran. Graph Based Semi-supervised Learning with Convolutional Neural Networks to Classify Crisis Related Tweets

    International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2018, Stanford, California, USA.

    2018
  • Firoj Alam , Ferda Ofli and Muhammad Imran. CrisisMMD: Multimodal Twitter Datasets from Seven Natural Disasters

    In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2018, Stanford, California, USA.

    2018
  • Firoj Alam , Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran, Michael Aupetit. A Twitter Tale of Three Hurricanes: Harvey, Irma, and Maria

    In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), May 2018, Rochester NY, USA.

    2018