I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at LUMS and the founding director of the Center for Speech and Language Technologies (CSaLT). I am a Fulbright Scholar and received my Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. 

My research interests include Speech & Natural Language Processing, Speech-based Human Computer Interfaces, and Information & Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). The aim of my research is to enable information access and social connectivity for under-connected and under-served populations (low-literate, low-income, tech naïve, visually impaired, linguistically/socially marginalized, and geographically remote communities, and oral cultures) throughout the developing world. My work focusses on the development of speech-based information services and social networks accessible over simple and feature phones to be used as vehicles for large-scale dissemination of development-related information, pulling information in the form of real-time surveys and for performing randomized controlled trials and demographic studies. These services also provide target marginalized populations with a voice and a digital social identity. My work in Speech and Language technologies is focused on the localization of linguistic resources and techniques to Pakistani context for the development of Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech, Voice-biometrics, Spoken Term Detection and relevant capabilities. I teach Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing and Machine Learning at graduate and undergraduate levels.

My research has been funded by prestigious organizations like Google Inc., Facebook Research, UNICEF, GIZ, National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI), and the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. I am an Associate Chair in the program committee for CHI. I have also been the program committee chair for short papers for ICTD 2017 and a program committee member for ICTD, and ACM COMPASS (formerly ACM DEV) since 2015.

Website: http://aghaaliraza.com

Title Publication Authors Year
SimplifyUR: Unsupervised Lexical Text Simplification for Urdu

LREC

 Namoos Hayat Qasmi, Haris Bin Zia, Awais Athar, and Agha Ali Raza 2020
An Empirical Comparison of Technologically Mediated Advertising in Under-connected Populations CHI Mustafa Naseem, Bilal Saleem, Sacha Ahmad, Jay Chen, Agha Ali Raza 2020
Patriarchy, Maternal Health and Spiritual Healing: Designing Maternal Health Interventions in Pakistan CHI Maryam Mustafa, Amna Batool, Beenish Fatima, Fareeda Nawaz, Kentaro Toyama, Agha Ali Raza 2020
An Unsupervised Spoken Term Detection System for Urdu CLT Hafiz Rizwan Iqbal, Saad Bin Zahid, Agha Ali Raza 2020
The Internet of the Orals CACM Aditya Vashistha, Umar Saif, and Agha Ali Raza 2019
Designing ICT Interventions for Women in Pakistan CACM Maryam Mustafa, Amna Batool, and Agha Ali Raza 2019
Towards Digitization of Collaborative Savings Among Low-Income Groups CSCW Hamid Mehmood, Tallal Ahmad, Lubna Razaq, Shrirang Mare, Maryam Zafar Usmani, Richard Anderson, and Agha Ali Raza 2019
Voice-Based Quizzes for Measuring Knowledge Retention in Under-Connected Populations CHI Agha Ali Raza, Zain Tariq, Shan Randhawa, Bilal Saleem, Awais Athar, Umar Saif, and Roni Rosenfeld 2019
Threats, Abuses, Flirting, and Blackmail: Gender Inequity in Social Media Voice Forums CHI Aditya Vashistha, Abhinav Garg, Richard Anderson, and Agha Ali Raza 2019
Rapid Collection of Spontaneous Speech Corpora using Telephonic Community Forums INTERSPEECH Agha Ali Raza, Awais Athar, Shan Randhawa, Zain Tariq, Muhammad Bilal Saleem, Haris Bin Zia, Umar Saif, Roni Rosenfeld 2018
Urdu Word Segmentation using Conditional Random Fields COLING Haris Bin Zia, Agha Ali Raza, Awais Athar 2018
Baang: A Viral Speech-based Social Platform for Under-Connected Populations CHI Agha Ali Raza, Bilal Saleem, Shan Randhawa, Zain Tariq, Awais Athar, Umar Saif, Roni Rosenfeld 2018
PronouncUR: An Urdu Pronunciation Lexicon Generator LREC Haris Bin Zia, Agha Ali Raza, Awais Athar 2018
The Case for IVR-Based Citizen Journalism in Pakistan MobileHCI Hira Ejaz, Syed Ali Hussain, Agha Ali Raza 2018
ICT Intervention for Agriculture Development: Designing an IVR System for Farmers in Pakistan ICTD Waleed Riaz, Haris Durrani, Suleman Shahid, Agha Ali Raza 2017
Real-time Automated Surveys among Low-literate Masses using Voice-based Telephone Services ACM DEV Agha Ali Raza, Samia Razaq, Amna Raja, Rizwan Naru, Ali Gibran, Abdullah Sabri, Haroon Niaz, Muhammad Bilal Saleem, Umar Saif 2016
Viral Spread via Entertainment and Voice Messaging Among Telephone Users in India ICTD Agha Ali Raza, Rajat Kulshreshtha, Spandana Gella, Sean Blagsvedt, Maya Chandrasekaran, Bhiksha Raj, Roni Rosenfeld 2016
Rapid Development of Public Health Education Systems in Low-Literacy Multilingual Environments: Combating Ebola Through Voice Messaging SLaTE, INTERSPEECH Nikolas Wolfe, Juneki Hong, Agha Ali Raza, Bhiksha Raj and Roni Rosenfeld 2015
Influence Propagation: Patterns, Model and a Case Study PAKDD Yibin Lin, Agha Ali Raza, Jay-Yoon Lee, Danai Koutra, Roni Rosenfeld and Christos Faloutsos 2014
Behavior Analysis of Low-literate Users of a Viral Speech-based Telephone Service ACM DEV Haohan Wang, Agha Ali Raza, Yibin Lin, and Roni Rosenfeld 2013
Job Opportunities through Entertainment: Virally Spread Speech-Based Services for Low-Literate Users CHI Agha Ali Raza, Farhan Ul Haq, Zain Tariq, Mansoor Pervaiz, Samia Razaq, Umar Saif and Roni Rosenfeld 2013
Spread and Sustainability: The Geography and Economics of Speech-Based Services ACM DEV Agha Ali Raza, Farhan Ul Haq, Zain Tariq, Umar Saif, and Roni Rosenfeld 2013
Viral entertainment as a vehicle for disseminating speech-based services to low-literate users ICTD Agha Ali Raza, Mansoor Pervaiz, Christina Milo, Samia Razaq, Guy Alster, Jahanzeb Sherwani, Umar Saif, and Roni Rosenfeld 2012
An ASR System for Spontaneous Urdu Speech O-COCOSDA Agha Ali Raza, Sarmad Hussain, Huda Sarfraz, Inam Ullah, Zahid Sarfraz 2010
Speech Corpus Development for a Speaker Independent Spontaneous Urdu Speech Recognition System O-COCOSDA Huda Sarfraz, Sarmad Hussain, Riffat Bokhari, Agha Ali Raza, Inam Ullah, Zahid Sarfraz, Sophia Pervez, Asad Mustafa, Iqra Javed, Rahila Parveen 2010
Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition for Urdu FIT Huda Sarfraz, Sarmad Hussain, Riffat Bokhari, Agha Ali Raza, Inam Ullah, Zahid Sarfraz, Sophia Pervez, Asad Mustafa, Iqra Javed, Rahila Parveen 2010
Design and development of phonetically rich Urdu speech corpus O-COCOSDA Agha Ali Raza, Sarmad Hussain, Huda Sarfraz, Inam Ullah, Zahid Sarfraz 2009
N-GRAM Based Authorship Attribution in Urdu Poetry CLT Agha Ali Raza, Awais Athar, and Sajid Nadeem 2009
Interpolation with rational cubic spirals ICET Agha Ali Raza, Zulfiqar Habib, Manabu Sakai 2008
On a Special case of path planning CIIT Agha Ali Raza, Asma Zaib, Sana Altaf, Zulfiqar Habib 2008
Pilot of an Interactive Voice Response Service for Delivering Maternal Health Information to Expectant Fathers in Pakistan SBCC Sacha St-Onge Ahmad, Mustafa Naseem, Shan Randhawa, Muhammad Bilal Saleem, Agha Ali Raza, Tallal Ahmad, Agha Ali Raza 2020
Determining Socio-Economic status of Twitter users through their educational level, content they post and language HCIxB, CHI Extended abstract: Ayesha Asghar, Agha Ali Raza, Maryam Mustafa 2019
Save My Money: Digitizing Informal Savings in Pakistan HCIxB, CHI Hamid Mehmood, Lubna Razaq, Jennifer Webster, Amna Batool, Maryam Mustafa, Agha Ali Raza, Richard Anderson 2018
How to Advertise a Speech-Based Service to Offline Populations: A Case Study from Pakistan HCIxB, CHI Maryam Ayub, Sacha St-Onge Ahmad, Bilal Saleem, Agha Ali Raza, Mustafa Naseem, Jay Chen 2018
Usage and Feedback from a 3-Week Launch of a Maternal Health Line for Men in Pakistan HCIxB, CHI Sacha St-Onge Ahmad, Muhammad Bilal Saleem, Maryam Ayub, Tallal Ahmad, Shan Randhawa, Zain Tariq, Mustafa Naseem, Agha Ali Raza 2018
IVR-Based Citizen Journalism in Pakistan HCIxB, CHI Hira Ejaz, Syed Ali Hussain, Agha Ali Raza 2018
Maternal Awareness for Low-Literate Expecting Parents via Voice-Based Telephone Services HCIxB, CHI Sacha St-Onge Ahmad, Mustafa Naseem, Agha Ali Raza 2017
Sustainable IVR-Based Social Media for the Developing World HCIxB, CHI Abdullah Kharal, Mustafa Naseem, Sacha St-Onge Ahmad, Agha Ali Raza 2017
Changing Perceptions of Citizens of India and Pakistan HCIxB, CHI Aditya Vashistha, Agha Ali Raza, Umar Saif, Roni Rosenfeld, Richard Anderson 2016

 

 

 

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