About me

My research lies at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Social Science (CSS), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). I develop interpretable, scalable, responsible, and human-centered computational methods for understanding communication, discourse, and decision-making in socio-technical systems. By combining NLP, large language models, data-driven methods, and human–AI collaboration, I study information ecosystems and AI-mediated communication with the goal of building transparent and trustworthy AI systems to address societal challenges. See the research details here .
My research has been published in prominent venues such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, AACL-IJCNLP, ICWSM, AAAI, AIES, ACM WebSci, IC2S2, IEEE Big Data. See my publication lists here .
[CV]

I am a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Computer Science (CS) at Purdue University and Research Affiliate of the Governance and Responsible AI Lab (GRAIL) in Purdue University’s Department of Political Science. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Purdue University, advised by Dr. Dan Goldwasser. I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University and a Faculty Affiliate at the GRAIL lab. I obtained M.Sc. in Computer Science (CS) from Old Dominion University (ODU). I completed my B.Sc in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).

Recent News

📝 September 08, 2026: Long paper accepted to publish in AACL-IJCNLP 2026.
💰 August 20, 2026: Received National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Grant: NAIRR260365 (2000 GPU Hours) as a PI. [Link]
🎤 August 20, 2026: Gave an invited talk at the School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, on “From Understanding Communication to Responsible AI Intervention”.
July 28-31, 2026: Attending IC2S2 2026 in Burlington, Vermont and presenting my work Who Gets Which Message? Auditing Demographic Bias in LLM-Generated Targeted Text
July 02-07, 2026: Attended ACL 2026 in San Diego, California and presented my two papers Who Gets Which Message? Auditing Demographic Bias in LLM-Generated Targeted Text and Reasoning-Based Refinement of Unsupervised Text Clusters with LLMs. Besides, I organized a BoF session on “From Text to Structure: Interpretable and Auditable Systems with Language Models”. Also, I served as a virtual session chair at the LLM Efficiency track.
🏆 July 01, 2026: Received Postdoctoral Travel Award, Purdue University, Summer 2026 (Competitive; awarded to 22 of 58 applicants across 11 Purdue colleges).
June 11, 2026: Organizer and Chair of Birds of a Feather (BoF) session in ACL 2026 on “From Text to Structure: Interpretable and Auditable Systems with Language Models”. Please join on July 6 (Monday), 11:00-12:30 PST, Room: La Jolla A&B, Grand Hyatt Manchester San Diego.
🎤 May 12, 2026: Gave an invited talk at Dr. Emma Pierson’s lab, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, on “From Text to Structure: Interpretable and Auditable Systems with Language Models”.
🏆 May 05, 2026: Our project titled “Enhancing Graph-Based Retrieval in Explore AGORA” was recognized as a Presentation with Distinction at Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference, Spring’26. This work was done by AI Forge students with GRAIL lab.
April 15-16, 2026: Attended Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD) 2026 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to present two posters.
April 14, 2026: Extended Abstract accepted in IC2S2 2026.
📝 April 06, 2026: Two long papers accepted to publish in ACL 2026.
🎤 November 11, 2025: Gave an invited talk at IEEE DISTILL 2025 Workshop on Distributed, Secure, and Trustworthy Intelligence with LLMs on “Understanding Microtargeting Patterns in the Era of LLMs”.
November 04–09, 2025: Attended EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou, China and presented our work Post-hoc Study of Climate Microtargeting on Social Media Ads with LLMs: Thematic Insights and Fairness Evaluation.
October 01, 2025: Area Chair (AC) of ACL Rolling Review (ARR).
📝 August 20, 2025: Long paper accepted to publish in EMNLP 2025.
August 13, 2025: Tutorial Co-Chair ICWSM 2026. Please submit your proposal by January 15, 2026. cfp: https://www.icwsm.org/2026/submit.html
June 23-26, 2025: Attended ICWSM 2025 in Copenhagen, Denmark and presented our work Discovering Latent Themes in Social Media Messaging: A Machine-in-the-Loop Approach Integrating LLMs.
🎤 June 12, 2025: Gave an invited talk at School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, on “Understanding and Analyzing Microtargeting Patterns on Social Media”. Thanks to Dr. Jenny Zhang for hosting me!
May 22, 2025: Senior Program Committee (SPC) of ICWSM 2026.
May 20-23, 2025: Attended WebSci’25 in New Brunswick, New Jersey and presented our work Can LLMs Assist Annotators in Identifying Morality Frames? - Case Study on Vaccination Debate on Social Media.
April 29-May 04, 2025: Attended NAACL 2025 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and presented our work Uncovering Latent Arguments in Social Media Messaging by Employing LLMs-in-the-Loop Strategy. Also, I organized BoF session on “Understanding and Analyzing Microtargeting Patterns on Social Media”.
April 15-16, 2025: Attended Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD) 2025 at the University of Notre Dame to present two posters.
🏆 April 11, 2025: Received Graduate Women in Science Program (WISP) award from College of Science, Purdue University.
March 26, 2025: Organizer and Chair of Birds of a Feather (BoF) session in NAACL 2025 on “Understanding and Analyzing Microtargeting Patterns on Social Media”. Please join on May 2 (Friday), 9:00-10:30 MST, Room: 230 -Pecos, Albuquerque Convention Center.
🏆 March 19, 2025: Received NAACL 2025 Diversity and Inclusion Award (D&I Award).
📰 March 11, 2025: My research and interview were featured in AIhub.
🏆 February 26, 2025: My Ph.D. thesis proposal won the best poster award in 2025 AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium. [Award] [Announcement] [Photo]
February 25-March 04, 2025: Attended AAAI 2025 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and presented my Ph.D. Thesis Proposal at AAAI-25 Doctoral Consortium.
🎓 February 07, 2025: Defended my Ph.D. dissertation.
📝 January 31, 2025: Long paper accepted to publish in ACM WebSci 2025.
📝 January 22, 2025: Long paper accepted to publish in NAACL 2025.

Older News (2024 and earlier)

🏆 November 02, 2024: Ph.D. Thesis Proposal accepted at AAAI-25 Doctoral Consortium.
October 29-31, 2024: Attended at the 2024 Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA) Annual Meeting and organized a Tutorial on “Analyzing Microtargeting on Social Media”.
October 04, 2024: Tutorial Co-Chair ICWSM 2025. Please submit your proposal by January 15, 2025. cfp: https://www.icwsm.org/2025/submit/index.html
📝 July 15, 2024: Long paper accepted to publish in ICWSM-2025.
July 7, 2024: Session proposal accepted at 2024 Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA) Annual Meeting.
June 14-15, 2024: Attended 2024 Mexican NLP Summer School.
June 12, 2024: Associate Chair (AC) of CSCW 2025.
June 9, 2024: Associate Chair (AC) of CSCW 2024.
May 20-21, 2024: Attended Midwest Machine Learning Symposium (MMLS), 2024.
May 09, 2024: Became Ambassador for ICWSM.
April 15-16, 2024: Attended Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD) 2024 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor to give a talk.
🏆 March 28, 2024: Received Graduate School Summer Research Grant Award.
February 6, 2024: Guest lecture Natural Language Processing, Purdue University.
December 13, 2023: Passed prelim and became Ph.D. candidate.
August 08-10, 2023: Attended AIES-2023, Montreal, Canada.
June 05-08, 2023: Attended ICWSM-2023, Limassol, Cyprus.
📝 May 05, 2023: Long paper accepted in AIES-2023 as oral presentation.
📝 May 02, 2023: Long paper accepted in ACL 2023.
🏆 April 14, 2023: Received Graduate Teaching Award from Purdue CS department.
December 17-20, 2022: Attended IEEE BigData 2022, Osaka, Japan (Virtually).
December 7-11, 2022: Attended EMNLP 2022, Abu Dhabi, UAE (Virtually).
📝 October 24, 2022: Regular paper accepted to publish in IEEE BigData 2022.
📝 July 16, 2022: Long paper accepted to publish in ICWSM-2023.
June 06-09, 2022: Attended ICWSM-2022, Atlanta, Georgia.
🏆 May 9, 2022: Received ACM-W scholarship to attend ICWSM’22, a one-time award.
🏆 May 9, 2022: Received ICWSM2022 travel grant.
🏆 April 11, 2022: Received Graduate School Summer Research Grant Award.
📝 April 7, 2022: Long paper accepted to publish in NAACL 2022.
📝 July 15, 2021: Long paper accepted to publish in ICWSM-2022.
June 08-10, 2021: Attended ICWSM-2021, Atlanta, Georgia (Virtually).
🏆 March 30, 2021: Received Graduate School Summer Research Grant Award.
📝 March 15, 2021: Long paper accepted to publish in ICWSM-2021.
January 27-29, 2021: Attended IEEE ICSC 2021, Irvine, California (Virtually).
December 10-13, 2020: Attended IEEE BigData 2020, Atlanta, Georgia (Virtually).
📝 December 06, 2020: Short paper accepted to publish in ICSC-2021.
August 31, 2020: Submitted Ph.D. Plan of Study.
December 17, 2019: Passed Ph.D. qualifier.
August 10-16, 2019: Attended IJCAI-2019, Macao, China.
August 04-08, 2019: Attended KDD 2019, Anchorage, Alaska.
July 07-12, 2019: Attended International HPC Summer School IHPCSS2019, Kobe, Japan.
June 07, 2019: Paper accepted to publish in WISDOM’19 co-located with KDD’19, Anchorage, Alaska.
May 18, 2019: Paper accepted for a presentation in SocialNLP 2019 @ IJCAI-2019, Macao, China.
📝 April 30, 2019: Journal paper named “Analysis of Subtelomeric REXTAL Assemblies Using QUAST” is available online.
🏆 April 12-13, 2019: Attended CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop, Chicago, IL.
March 15, 2019: Selected to participate in the IHPCSS2019, Kobe, Japan.
📝 January 30, 2019: Paper accepted to publish in TCBB journal.
January 7, 2019: Started Ph.D. in Computer Science at Purdue University, West Lafayette.
December 13-14, 2018: Attended SCEC 2018 in Delhi, India.
October 15, 2018: Got admission offer for Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University with a Research Assistantship beginning in Spring 2019.
🏆 October 4, 2018: Awarded travel funding to attend Second Workshop on Software Challenges to Exascale Computing SCEC 2018.
September 29, 2018: Attended UM Explore Graduate Studies in CSE 2018 Workshop.
September 26-28, 2018: Attended GHC 2018 in Houston, TX to present my research Poster.
August 2018: Graduated with Master’s degree in Computer Science from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA.
🏆 July 26, 2018: Received travel award to attend UM Explore Graduate Studies in CSE 2018 Workshop.
🏆 April 24, 2018: Awarded as Computer Science Outstanding Graduate Researcher.
📝 March 25, 2018: A Paper titled “REXTAL: Regional Extension of Assemblies Using Linked-Reads” was accepted in ISBRA 2018, Beijing, China.
🏆 September 22, 2017: Won 2nd prize in Tapia Student Poster Competition in ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, Atlanta, GA.
📝 June 16, 2017: A paper titled “Quantification of Twist from the Central Lines of β-strands” was accepted in Journal of Computational Biology.
🏆 October 19-21, 2016: Attended GHC 2016 as a GHC Scholar in Houston, TX and presented my research Poster.
🏆 September 14-17, 2016: Attended with the travel grant at ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, Austin, TX.
🏆 April 15-16, 2016: Attended CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop, San Diego, CA.

Tunazzina Islam

Recent News