About me
I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science (CS) at Purdue University and also a Faculty 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 from Purdue University, advised by Dr. Dan Goldwasser. 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).
[CV]
Research Overview
My research interests broadly lie in AI for Societal Impact, at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Social Science (CSS). I design scalable, explainable, collaborative, and socially responsible AI methods to tackle challenges in microtargeting analysis, discourse understanding, responsible AI integration, and human–AI collaboration. These approaches are applied to socially significant domains, including elections, climate debates, vaccine debates, lifestyle choices (yoga, keto, veganism), and AI Governance. See the research details here .
My research has been published in prominent venues such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ICWSM, AAAI, AAAI/ACM AIES, ACM WebSci, IEEE Big Data. See my publication lists here .
Recent News
- 🏆 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 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 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 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 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: Attending AAAI 2025 and presenting 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.
![[Photo]](https://tunazislam.github.io/images/Best_Poster_Award_AAAI_DC_2025.jpeg){kind=link}
Older News (2024 and earlier)
* 🏆 November 02, 2024: Ph.D. Thesis Proposal accepted at AAAI-25 Doctoral Consortium. * October 29-31, 2024: Attended at [2024 Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA)](https://academicdatascience.org/adsa-meetings/2024-adsa-annual-meeting/) Annual Meeting and organized 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](https://www.icwsm.org/2025/submit/index.html) * 📝 July 15, 2024: **Long paper** accepted to publish in [ICWSM-2025](https://www.icwsm.org/2025/). * July 7, 2024: Session proposal accepted at [2024 Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA)](https://academicdatascience.org/adsa-meetings/2024-adsa-annual-meeting/) Annual Meeting. * June 14-15, 2024: Attended [2024 Mexican NLP Summer School](https://ampln.github.io/escuelaverano2024/). * June 12, 2024: **Associate Chair (AC)** of [CSCW 2025](https://cscw.acm.org/2025/). * June 9, 2024: **Associate Chair (AC)** of [CSCW 2024](https://cscw.acm.org/2024/). * May 20-21, 2024: Attended [Midwest Machine Learning Symposium (MMLS)](https://midwest-ml.org/2024/), 2024. * May 09, 2024: Became Ambassador for ICWSM. * April 15-16, 2024: Attended [Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD)](https://ai.engin.umich.edu/news/midwest-speech-and-language-days/) 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](https://www.aies-conference.com/2023/), Montreal, Canada. * June 05-08, 2023: Attended [ICWSM-2023](https://www.icwsm.org/2023/index.html/), Limassol, Cyprus. * 📝 May 05, 2023: **Long paper** accepted in [AIES-2023](https://www.aies-conference.com/2023/) as oral presentation. * 📝 May 02, 2023: **Long paper** accepted in [ACL 2023](https://2023.aclweb.org/). * 🏆 April 14, 2023: Received Graduate Teaching Award from Purdue CS department. * December 17-20, 2022: Attended [IEEE BigData 2022](https://bigdataieee.org/BigData2022/), Osaka, Japan (Virtually). * December 7-11, 2022: Attended [EMNLP 2022](https://2022.emnlp.org/), Abu Dhabi, UAE (Virtually). * 📝 October 24, 2022: Regular paper accepted to publish in [IEEE BigData 2022](https://bigdataieee.org/BigData2022/). * 📝 July 16, 2022: **Long paper** accepted to publish in [ICWSM-2023](https://www.icwsm.org/2023/index.html/). * June 06-09, 2022: Attended [ICWSM-2022](https://www.icwsm.org/2022/index.html), Atlanta, Georgia. * 🏆 May 9, 2022: Received [ACM-W scholarship](https://women.acm.org/scholars/acm-w-scholars/tunazzina-islam/) 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](https://2022.naacl.org/). * 📝 July 15, 2021: **Long paper** accepted to publish in [ICWSM-2022](https://www.icwsm.org/2022/index.html/). * June 08-10, 2021: Attended [ICWSM-2021](https://www.icwsm.org/2021/index.html), Atlanta, Georgia (Virtually). * 🏆 March 30, 2021: Received Graduate School Summer Research Grant Award. * 📝 March 15, 2021: **Long paper** accepted to publish in [ICWSM-2021](https://www.icwsm.org/2021/index.html). * January 27-29, 2021: Attended [IEEE ICSC 2021](https://semanticcomputing.wixsite.com/icsc2021), Irvine, California (Virtually). * December 10-13, 2020: Attended [IEEE BigData 2020](https://bigdataieee.org/BigData2020/), Atlanta, Georgia (Virtually). * 📝 December 06, 2020: Short paper accepted to publish in [ICSC-2021](https://www.semanticcomputing.org/). * August 31, 2020: Submitted Ph.D. Plan of Study. * December 17, 2019: Passed Ph.D. qualifier. * August 10-16, 2019: Attended [IJCAI-2019](https://ijcai19.org/), Macao, China. * August 04-08, 2019: Attended [KDD 2019](https://www.kdd.org/kdd2019/), Anchorage, Alaska. * July 07-12, 2019: Attended International HPC Summer School [IHPCSS2019](https://ss19.ihpcss.org/), Kobe, Japan. * June 07, 2019: Paper accepted to publish in [WISDOM'19](https://sentic.net/wisdom/#wisdom2019) co-located with [KDD'19](https://www.kdd.org/kdd2019/), Anchorage, Alaska. * May 18, 2019: Paper accepted for a presentation in [SocialNLP 2019](https://sites.google.com/site/socialnlp2019/) [@ IJCAI-2019](https://ijcai19.org/), Macao, China. * 📝 April 30, 2019: [Journal paper](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8703093) 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](https://ss19.ihpcss.org/), Kobe, Japan. * 📝 January 30, 2019: Paper accepted to publish in [TCBB journal](https://www.computer.org/web/tcbb). * January 7, 2019: Started Ph.D. in [Computer Science](https://www.cs.purdue.edu/) at [Purdue University, West Lafayette](https://www.purdue.edu/). * December 13-14, 2018: Attended [SCEC 2018](https://scec18.github.io/) in Delhi, India. * October 15, 2018: Got admission offer for Ph.D. in [Computer Science](https://www.cs.purdue.edu/) from [Purdue University](https://www.purdue.edu/) 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](https://scec18.github.io/). * September 29, 2018: Attended [UM Explore Graduate Studies in CSE 2018 Workshop](https://www.eecs.umich.edu/cse/Explore_Grad_Studies/). * September 26-28, 2018: Attended [GHC 2018](https://ghc.anitab.org/2018-attend/schedule-overview/poster-session/#biotech) in Houston, TX to present my research Poster. * August 2018: Graduated with Master's degree in [Computer Science](https://odu.edu/compsci) from [Old Dominion University](https://www.odu.edu/#prospective), Norfolk, VA. * 🏆 July 26, 2018: Received travel award to attend [UM Explore Graduate Studies in CSE 2018 Workshop](https://www.eecs.umich.edu/cse/Explore_Grad_Studies/). * 🏆 April 24, 2018: Awarded as [Computer Science Outstanding Graduate Researcher](https://twitter.com/oducs/status/988885970081714176). * 📝 March 25, 2018: A Paper titled "REXTAL: Regional Extension of Assemblies Using Linked-Reads" was accepted in [ISBRA 2018](http://alan.cs.gsu.edu/isbra18/), Beijing, China. * 🏆 September 22, 2017: Won **2nd prize** in [Tapia Student Poster Competition](https://twitter.com/Tunaz_Islam/status/911624351400767490) 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](https://home.liebertpub.com/publications/journal-of-computational-biology/31/overview). * 🏆 October 19-21, 2016: Attended GHC 2016 as a [GHC Scholar](https://ghc.anitab.org/2016-student-academic/scholarships/2016-ghc-scholars/attachment/tunazzina-islam-1/) 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.