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 |
Dr. Agha Ali Raza is responsible for teaching MS Artificial Intelligence courses.
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