Download [email protected] EDUCATION University of Maryland, College Park

ZAHRA ASHKTORAB
[email protected]
EDUCATION
University of Maryland, College Park
Ph.D in Information Science: Focus in HCI and Social Computing
Advisor: Jennifer Golbeck
~2017
University of Maryland, College Park
M.S. in Human Computer Interaction
Thesis: The Relationship Between Tweets and Freedom During Elections
2013
University of Maryland College Park
B.S. in Computer Science
B.A. in Middle East Studies
Minor: Arabic
2011
AWARDS
Anita Borg Scholarship
Code4Lib Diversity Scholarship
Microsoft Social Media Expo: semifinalist
August 2014
April 2014
March 2014
iAnon: Leveraging Social Network Big Data to Mitigate Behavioral Symptoms of Cyberbullying
Future of Information Alliance Seed Grant Competition Winner
2014
November 2013 – May
SERVICE
Mentor for New York University Abu Dhabi Hackathon for Social Good in the Arab World
February 2014
Led team that developed application: OrphanLocator that used fuzzy matching to find lost children during times of disaster
Student Representative for Dean Search Committee, College of Information Studies
2014-2015
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Holiday Park Senior Center, Silver Spring, MD
[Instructor – “Introduction to iPads”]
[Developed syllabus and overall course structure]
2013
RELATED EXPERIENCE
IBM Research Center Watson Intern, IBM Almaden Research Center
May 2014 – August 2014
Intern
Used Topic Models to identify different types of Discourse on ask.fm; built classifiers to detect different types of discourse and
analyzed correlations between discourse and personality types
Data Science for Social Good Fellowship, Computation Institute, Chicago, Illinois
Fellow
June 2013 – August 2013
Classified tweets as pertaining to disaster or not (using Machine Learning techniques), Extracted Relevant information from tweets
during disasters for Red Cross and UN Disaster relief workers, Presented work at “Data Slam” hosted by University of Chicago,
Presented work at the 19th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) poster session
University of Maryland, College Park
Graduate Research Assistant
Sept. 2013 – Present
Cyberbullying detection and prevention research: Research on automatic detection of cyberbullying in ask.fm, interface and system
design to mitigate behavioral symptoms of cyberbullying
Global Election Prediction Project: Collecting Twitter Data from states with varying “Freedom Statuses”, Sentiment analysis and
analyzing edge relationships between influential Twitter users
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
Post-baccalaureate Intramural Research Training Fellow
May 2012 – August 2012
Created software in image processing that reproduced #D Tumor and Organ segmentation
National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution
Intern
June 2011 – August 2011
Created a website that showcased sustainability initiatives in the East Zone Mall of the Smithsonian, Collected data, pictures,
conducted interviews to build a sustainability website
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
Summer Intern
Parsed files to find duplicates in Amish Genealogy Database 4,
Used Ruby to update information in Amish Genealogy Database 5
May 2010 – August 2010
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
Summer Intern
May 2009 – August 2009
Created “Star Glyph application”: a software application in language Processing that graphically represent medical data, Presented at
NIH Biomedical Computing Interest Group (BCIG): “Bench to Bedside Computing”
Presented Poster “A General Purpose 2-D Graphics Package for Plotting Biomedical Data”
TALKS AND PANELS
2014
Grace Hopper Celebration in Computing Lightning Talk in Human Computer Interaction:
October 2014
iAnon: Leveraging Social Network Big Data to Mitigate Behavioral Symptoms of Cyberbullying
Association for Women in Computing Panel: 2014
November 2014
Spoke on Maryland Center for Women in Computing and AWC - Grace Hopper Post-Event Networking Panel and Reception
PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS
2014
Tweedr: Mining Twitter to Inform Disaster Response
The 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, 2014
“How do I get back to my Homescreen?”: Education on Tablet Usage for Senior Citizens
Developing a Living HCI Curriculum to Support a Global Community: CHI 2014 Workshop
“Twitter-Informed Disaster Relief”
Poster Session at Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD); KDD for Social Good
2013
“Bear-with-me: an embodied prototype to explore tangible two-way exchanges of emotional language”
Extended Abstract in Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
2012
“Living the good life? Mortality and hospital utilization patterns in the old order amish”
PLoS One: doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0051560
LANGUAGES
[English – native language]
[Farsi – speak fluently and read/write with high proficiency]
[Arabic – speak, read and write with basic competence]
COMPUTER SKILLS
Languages - Python, Java, C, Processing, Ruby, Ocaml, Scheme, PHP, MySQL, Javascript
Software - Excel, Word, Windows Movie Maker, Power Point, Photoshop, HTML, Spotfire, Tableau
MEMBERSHIPS
[Association for Computing Machinery]