I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at SUNY Albany and founder of the Personalized AI (PersAI) Lab. My research interests include data mining and machine learning with a focus on human-centered applications, such as recommender systems, educational systems, and health applications. Check my research for more specific topics.
I received my PhD and Master’s in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh, my Master’s in Computer Engineering from University of Tehran, and my Bachelor’s in Computer Science/Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. More details can be found in my CV.
I have multiple open positions in PersAI lab. If you are interested, take a look at opportunities – funded open positions.
News
- 08/2023: Was delighted to organize the “Learning How to Upskill Online” event at Albany Public Library, Delaware Branch!
- 07/2023: Had a blast organizing the “Intro to AI for Tweens” event at Albany Public Library, North Albany Branch!

- 04/2023: Honored to speak and serve as a panelist at the CISE CAREER Workshop, organized by National Science Foundation
- 02/2023: Excited to co-organize AI4EDU: the 4th International Workshop on AI for Education at AAAI (2023), with an amazing program including keynotes from Prof. Tom Mitchell and Prof. Sidney D’Mello
- 01/2023: Many congratulations to Dr. Chunpai Wang, our third PersAI Ph.D. graduate, for defending his thesis on “Sequential User Modeling and Recommendation Under Partially Observable Environment.” We are all proud of you!
- 07/2022: Honored to receive Inventors Recognition Award from University at Albany!
- 06/2022: Many congratulations to Dr. Mengfan Miley Yao, our second PersAI Ph.D. graduate, for defending her thesis on “High-capacity and interpretable temporal point process models for user activity sequence modeling.” We are very proud of you!
- 04/2022: Grateful to receive Junior Faculty Recognition for Early Career Extramural Awards from University at Albany!
- 02/2022: Happy to organize and Co-Chair - 2nd Workshop on Multi-Objective Recommender Systems (MORS) at ACM RecSys (2022)
- 04/2021: Honored to receive NSF CAREER award for the project “CAREER: Time-Aware Multi-Objective Recommendation in Online Learning Environments” project link
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