I am a post-doctoral researcher at IRLab (formerly 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 co-organized several shared tasks and workshops on recommender systems and conversational systems. In particular, I am co-organizing the IGLU Contest at NeurIPS 2021, and the XMRec Workshop co-located with RecSys 2021. Also, I have co-organized the SCAI Workshop, co-located with EMNLP 2020 and MICROS Workshop co-located with ECIR 2020. As part of the SCAI Workshop, I chaired a shared task, i.e., 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, Semantic Scholar, and DBLP profiles for more details. Moreover, I have been a member of program committees (PC) of various conferences such as SIGIR, ACL, WSDM, TheWebConference (WWW), EACL, ICTIR, and ECIR, while reviewing for major journals in the field such as TOIS, TKDE, IP&M, and ESWA.