Research
The current theme of my research lies in modelling human reasoning and discourse contributions using logical and learned representations of meaning in interactive dialogue. In addition to this I am exploring several directions of research which focus on adapting machine learning methods to more human-centered objectives for applications like image captioning, semantic grounding, tracking contributions in referential and goal-oriented dialogues. I am pursuing several research directions in this regard like experimenting with new states of discourse representation, building learned models of caption interpretation and evaluation, and using cognitive modelling to represent meanings of dialogue contributions.
One of the key aspects of my research is to tune re-inforcement learning methods to learn flexible and natural dialogue strategies for a given dialogue task. An active reseach direction I am exploring in this regard is how to reduce bias in the dialogue strategies for different types of users and make the interaction more fair for everyone through RL.
My Story
I was born in a lower-middle class family in Pakistan to a divorced mother. My mother, being a housewife, did not have an income channel so we were taken in by my grandfather.My grandfather and uncles did their utmost best to raise me and provide me with all the facilities they could afford. They always pushed me to be the best and I am thankful to God I was able to raise myself to their expectations. Its thanks to mine, my mother’s and all their efforts that I became the first person in my family to complete an undergraduate degree - from one of the best institutes of Pakistan (LUMS), that too on a fully funded scholarship.
Since my childhood days of playing games at a local arcade center I wanted to be someone who would contribute to the progress of technological innovation. I was always fascinated by how a machine created all those interesting characters on screen and enabled us to manipulate them. To fulfill this dream of mine, I came to USA to pursue my Ph.D. in Computer Science and be at the helm of technological innovation.
The fact that I have reached so far given the humble backgrounds of my family fills me with gratitude and hope. I feel it my responsibility to guide the future generations of my family and others with similar backgrounds and show them that pursuing your dreams is possible if you have passion for what you are doing.
Contact
email: baber.khalid@rutgers.edu