Hi, I’m Rasta

I’m currently a third-year PhD student in Computer Science at the Jeong Lab and the REAL AI Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My research interests lie at the intersection of Fair Machine Learning, with a focus on Generative AI, and the application of AI for Science and Social Good. My work investigates biases in various AI models and explores strategies to mitigate them. Currently, my research is centered on fair data imputation—using generative models to address missing data and enhance fairness in the crucial pre-processing stage of the AI pipeline.

Prior to this, I obtained my BS in Computer Engineering from University of Tehran, Iran. While there, I worked on detecting hate speech in cross-lingual context in twitter posts using graph neural networks.

Please feel free to reach out if our work or interests align 😃

News

• [July 2024]: Our paper Gone With the Bits: Benchmarking Bias in Facial Phenotype Degradation Under Low-Rate Neural Compression was accepted to ICML 2024 Next Generation of AI Safety Workshop
• [June 2024]: Joined Jeong Lab at UC Santa Barbara
• [Aug 2023]: Attended my first conference SIGKDD 2023 as a student volunteer and proxy presenter
• [September 2022]: Started my PhD in computer science at UC Santa Barbara
• [June 2022]: Completed my BSc in Computer Engineering at the University of Tehran, graduating in the top 15% of my class