I am a post-doctoral researcher at IRLab (formerely known as ILPS), the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. I obtained my Ph.D. in the Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. During my Ph.D., I spent four months visiting CIIR at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Before my Ph.D., I completed my MSc degree in the Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technologies at Tehran Polytechnic, Tehran, Iran.
My Ph.D. topic was on modeling user information needs on mobile devices. I studied this problem in three different settings. Therefore, I had the chance to explore multiple directions in Information Retrieval (IR), namely, recommender systems, unified (meta) search, and conversational systems. I intend to continue working mainly on conversational search system during my post-doctoral at UvA while exploring various areas related to IR, machine learning, and NLP.
I have been actively part of the IR community, serving as a SIGIR Student Liaison for two years. I have been involved in organizing the SCAI Workshop, co-located with EMNLP 2020 and MICROS Workshop co-located with ECIR 2020. Both workshops focus on research about conversational agents for search. As part of the SCAI Workshop, I chaired a data challenge the third version of the ConvAI challenges, focusing on mixed-initiative information-seeking conversations, called ClariQ. Also, I have been publishing and attending major IR conferences such as SIGIR, CIKM, CHIIR, ICTIR, and ECIR. Please check out my Google Scholar and DBLP profiles for more details. Moreover, I have been a member of program committees (PC) of various conferences such as SIGIR, WSDM, TheWebConference (WWW), and ECIR, while reviewing for major journals in the field such as TOIS, TKDE, IP&M, and ESWA.