About Me

I’m a PhD student in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am advised by Duncan Watts and Chris Callison-Burch. My research interests are at the intersection of computational social science and natural language processing, with a focus on using large language models to study bias in the mainstream media. I aim to understand publishing patterns in the U.S. news landcape, what events newspapers choose to report on, and how they frame their stories. I am part of the Penn Media Accountability Project and one of the lead researchers on the Media Bias Detector.

Before coming to Penn, I received my MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, where I was a Fulbright Scholar and worked with Emilio Ferrara and Nanyun Peng at the Information Sciences Institute. I received my BSc, also in Computer Science, from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, and spent a couple of years building natural language processing systems for Urdu, my native language. Some of my work here was featured on Forbes.

Here is my CV.

News

07/2024: We organized the first-ever joint SICSS and IC2S2 at Penn. We hope you all enjoyed your time in Philadelphia!

06/2024: We launched the Media Bias Detector! Read more about it here and listen to us talk about the project.

04/2024: Four submissions accepted to IC2S2 2024.

03/2024: Our paper on evaluating geopolitical bias in LLMs was accepted to NAACL 2024.

03/2024: I gave a talk about LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) at PyCon Pakistan 2024.

01/2024: I’m organizing the 2024 Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at Penn.

12/2023: I received an Outstanding Reviewer Award from EMNLP 2023!

11/2023: I’ll be presenting my work on mapping the U.S. news landscape at TADA 2023.

10/2023: I’m serving as Tutorial Chair for IC2S2 2024.