Doctoral Candidate
Computing and Information Science

	Rochester Institute of Technology 1 Lomb Memorial Dr Rochester, NY 14623
	(585) 210-7785
	sh2513 [at] rit [dot] edu
	Google Scholar
	@SaadHassann
	LinkedIn

I am a final-year Ph.D. student in Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, and a graduate research assistant at the Center for Accessibility and Inclusion Research and Linguistic and Assistive Technologies Laboratory. I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Matt Huenerfauth. In 2022, I was recognized as one of the five recipients of Duolingo's 2022 dissertation research grant (News). I am currently on the academic job market for positions starting in Fall 2023.

Research. One one side, I use Accessibility, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and AI insights to help build sign language technologies [ASSETS 2022, CHI 2022a, TACCESS 2021] and enhance captioning [CHI 2023, CHI 2022b, W4A 2021]. On the other side, I leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) and qualitative research methods to investigate ableist biases and anti-social behaviors [EMNLP 2021]. See publications section for full list of publications, demos, and invited talks.

Internships and Industry Experience. I am currently a Student Researcher at Google AI, where I work with the Sign Language Understanding Group (SLUG). During summer and fall 2022, I was a Research Scientist Intern at Meta Reality Labs, where I worked with the audio experiences team. Between May 2021 and May 2022, I was a student researcher and a research intern at Google Research with the Perception team. During my undergrad, I was an intern in the ACM Summer Internship Program.

Teaching. I have been fortunate to be taught by life-changing teachers throughout my schooling, who have inspired me to pursue teaching and research. I have had many opportunities to teach during my graduate and undergraduate degree programs. I would like to see more diverse groups of people become active in STEM fields, and I think diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are important towards that. See teaching section for more details about my teaching experience.

Undergrad. Prior to starting at RIT, I did my undergrad at Lahore University of Management Sciences , where I got my Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Computer Science.

** Beyond research the things that matter to me the most are political activism, sustainability, and human welfare. I also enjoy reading fiction and non-fiction books, creating Spotify playlists, and occassionally painting and creating digital art.

I'm always looking to work with new researchers and talk about shared academic or non-academic interests so please drop me an email.

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News

• September 15, 2022
  1 technical paper and 1 poster accepted at ASSETS 2022! The technical paper was nominated for the best paper award. I will be attending ASSETS 2022 in-person! Find the details of my two papers in publications section.
• July 15, 2022
  I was recognized as one of the five receipients of Duolingo's dissertation award & grant. I am interested in collaborating on ed-tech research on second language acquisiion. Please feel free to reach out if you are interested.
• May 23, 2022
  I started as a Research Scientist Intern at Meta (Reality Labs) with the Audio Research team!
• April 24, 2022
  Attending CHI 2022 in person in New Orleans! Find the details of my two papers in publications section. Looking forward to connecting with the community.
• April 15, 2022
  I will serving on the programme committee of ASSETS 2022.
• May 17, 2021
  I joined Google as an Research Intern for the summer, where I will be working with Thad Starner and George Sung!
• May 4, 2021
  I was recognized as one of the recipients of the 2021 Language Science and Computational Linguistics Student Excellence Award for my research and coursework in natural language processing.