CV
Samar Haider
Education
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA — PhD in Computer and Information Science (Aug 2020 – present)
- Advisors: Duncan Watts and Chris Callison-Burch
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA — MS in Computer Science (Aug 2018 – May 2020)
University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan — BSc in Computer Science (Oct 2012 – May 2016)
Awards & Honors
- Plenary Talk at IC2S2 2025 (Top 1.5%), 2025
- Outstanding Reviewer Award at EMNLP 2023 (Top 0.8%)
- Selected to attend the 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, 2020
- Best Research Award, USC (4 out of 1,137 students), 2020
- Fulbright Scholarship, U.S. Department of State ($120,000), 2018–2020
- Viterbi Dean’s Scholarship, USC ($10,000), 2018 & 2019
- Research Excellence Award, Center for Language Engineering, 2017 & 2018
- Dean’s Honor List, UET, 2014–2016
- Rank 10 out of 36,022 students in Pakistan’s Engineering College Admission Test (ECAT), 2012
Publications
- Amir Tohidi, Samar Haider, Duncan Watts. “Rethinking News Framing with Large Language Models.” Scientific Reports, 2025.
- Jenny Wang, Samar Haider, Amir Tohidi, Anushkaa Gupta, Yuxuan Zhang, Chris Callison-Burch, David Rothschild, Duncan Watts. “Media Bias Detector: Designing and Implementing a Tool for Real-Time Selection and Framing Bias Analysis in News Coverage.” CHI, 2025.
- Bryan Li, Fiona Luo, Samar Haider, Adwait Agashe, Siyu Li, Runqi Liu, Muqing Miao, Shriya Ramakrishnan, Yuan Yuan, Chris Callison-Burch. “Multilingual Retrieval Augmented Generation for Culturally-Sensitive Tasks.” Findings of ACL, 2025.
- Bryan Li, Samar Haider, Chris Callison-Burch. “This Land is {Your, My} Land: Evaluating Geopolitical Biases in Language Models Through Territorial Disputes.” NAACL, 2024.
- Bryan Li, Samar Haider, Fiona Luo, Adwait Agashe, Chris Callison-Burch. “BordIRlines: A Dataset for Evaluating Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation.” WikiNLP Workshop at EMNLP, 2024.
- Rubab Zahra Sarfraz, Samar Haider. “Vizard: Improving Visual Data Literacy with Large Language Models.” BigVis Workshop at VLDB, 2024.
- Samar Haider, Luca Luceri, Ashok Deb, Adam Badawy, Nanyun Peng, Emilio Ferrara. “Detecting Social Media Manipulation in Low-Resource Languages.” WWW ‘23 Companion, 2023.
- Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Samar Haider, Emilio Ferrara. “Digital Civic Participation and Misinformation during the 2020 Taiwanese Presidential Election.” Media and Communication, 2021.
- Samar Haider. “Urdu Word Embeddings.” LREC, 2018.
Teaching Experience
- Head TA, NETS1120 Networked Life (Duncan Watts), UPenn, Fall 2023
- TA, CIS5210 Artificial Intelligence (Chris Callison-Burch), UPenn, Fall 2021
- Head TA, CSCI662 Advanced NLP (Jonathan May), USC, Fall 2019
- Head TA, CS375 Data Mining (Muhammad Shahbaz), UET, Fall 2016
- Head TA, CSE473 Digital Image Processing (Usman Ghani), UET, Spring 2016 & 2017
Service
- Program & Tutorial Co-chair, IC2S2, 2024
- Co-chair, NAACL Student Research Workshop, 2025
- Organizer, SICSS @ UPenn, 2024–2026
- Program Committee: ACL ARR (2023–present), NAACL, EACL, COLM, EMNLP, COLING, ICLR, AAAI, WWW, IC2S2, ICWSM, CHI, TALLIP, Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Political Science
- UPenn CIS PhD Mentorship Program, 2022–present