Omar Shaikh

My interests lie at the intersection of human-computer interaction and natural langauge processing. More concretely, I'm interested in building safe and reliable social computing systems—powered by advances in NLP—that support how people interact with AI and eachother.

Education

Present — Sep. 2022
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
May 2022 — Aug. 2018
B.S. in Computer Science, Minor in Linguistics
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Concentrations in Intelligence and Theory

Honors and Awards

2023
Brown Institute for Media Innovation Magic Grant
2022
Outstanding Senior in Linguistics, Georgia Tech
Awarded to one senior from each language group for their excellence
2021
Sigma Xi Best Undergraduate Research Award
Awarded to two undergraduate students for outstanding research
2020
Best Poster, Honorable Mention at IEEE VIS
For "Mapping Researchers with PeopleMap"
2021 — 2020
President's Undergraduate Research Award (PURA)
Funding ($1500) for both the Spring 2020 and Fall 2021 semesters
2021 — 2018
Faculty Honors
GPA of 4.00, with a schedule of at least 12 hours of coursework with no W grades
Summer 2019
Square Intern Hackathon
1st place at Square's intern hackathon for work on identifying trending items
For 2018 AY
Outstanding Freshman, Georgia Tech, College of Computing
Awarded to a single freshman student for outstanding academic and extracurricular performance
2017
Middle East and Africa Finalist, Microsoft Imagine Cup
For work on Insight, a Virtual Reality tutoring platform; represented Saudi Arabia

Publications

Conferences & Journals

Grounding or Guesswork? Large Language Models are Presumptive Grounders
Omar Shaikh*, Kristina Gligorić*, Ashna Khetan, Matthias Gerstgrasser, Diyi Yang, Dan Jurafsky
2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). 2024.
Project PDF *Authors contributed equally
Rehearsal: Simulating Conflict to Teach Conflict Resolution
Omar Shaikh, Valentino Chai, Michele Gelfand, Diyi Yang*, Michael Bernstein*
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2024.
Project PDF *Authors contributed equally
Modeling Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Inference with Codenames Duet
Omar Shaikh*, Caleb Ziems*, Will Held, Aryan J. Pariani, Fred Morstatter, Diyi Yang
Findings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Findings). 2023.
Project PDF Code *Authors contributed equally
Can Large Language Models Transform Computational Social Science?
Caleb Ziems, Will Held, Omar Shaikh, Jiaao Chen, Zhehao Zhang, Diyi Yang
Computational Linguistics (CL). 2023.
Project PDF
On Second Thought, Let's Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoning
Omar Shaikh, Hongxin Zhang, Will Held, Michael Bernstein, Diyi Yang
61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). 2023.
Project PDF Code
NeuroCartography: Scalable Automatic Visual Summarization of Concepts in Deep Neural Networks
Haekyu Park, Nilaksh Das, Rahul Duggal, Austin P. Wright, Omar Shaikh, Fred Hohman, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). 2022.
Project Demo PDF Code Top 4 TVCG Papers invited to SIGGRAPH
Six Feet Apart: Online Payments During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Omar Shaikh, Cassandra Ung, Diyi Yang, Felipe Chacon
The 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). 2022.
Project PDF
RECAST: Enabling User Recourse and Interpretability of Toxicity Detection Models with Interactive Visualization
Austin P. Wright, Omar Shaikh, Haekyu Park, Will Epperson, Muhammed Ahmed, Stephane Pinel, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Diyi Yang
The 24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). 2021.
Project PDF Code
Examining the Ordering of Rhetorical Strategies in Persuasive Requests
Omar Shaikh, Jiaao Chen, Jon Saad-Falcon, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Diyi Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP Findings). 2020.
Project PDF Video Code
Argo Lite: Open-Source Interactive Graph Exploration and Visualization in Browsers
Siwei Li, Zhiyan Zhou, Anish Upadhayay, Omar Shaikh, Scott Freitas, Haekyu Park, Zijie J. Wang, Susanta Routray, Matthew Hull, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (CIKM). 2020.
Project Demo PDF Code
CNN Explainer: Learning Convolutional Neural Networks with Interactive Visualization
Zijie J. Wang, Robert Turko, Omar Shaikh, Haekyu Park, Nilaksh Das, Fred Hohman, Minsuk Kahng, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 2021.
Project Demo PDF Video Recording Code Top of Github Trending, Top 4 TVCG Papers invited to SIGGRAPH
Nonverbal Synchrony in Virtual Reality
Yilu Sun, Omar Shaikh, Andrea Won
Public Library of Science (PLoS One). 2019.
Project PDF Code
Personalized Avatars and Self-Presence
Yilu Sun, Swati Pandita, Omar Shaikh, Byungdoo Kim, Andrea Won
International Society for Presence Research Annual Conference (PRESENCE). 2018.
Project PDF

Posters & Extended Abstracts

MisVis: Explaining Web Misinformation Connections via Visual Summary
Seongmin Lee, Sadia Afroz, Haekyu Park, Zijie J. Wang, Omar Shaikh, Vibhor Sehgal, Ankit Peshin, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
CHI '22 Extended Abstracts (CHI LBW). 2022.
Project Demo PDF
EnergyVis: Interactively Tracking and Exploring Energy Consumption for ML Models
Omar Shaikh, Jon Saad-Falcon, Austin P. Wright, Nilaksh Das, Scott Freitas, Omar Isaac Asensio, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
CHI '21 Extended Abstracts (CHI LBW). 2021.
Project PDF Video Recording Code
Mapping Researchers with PeopleMap
Jon Saad-Falcon, Omar Shaikh, Zijie J. Wang, Austin P. Wright, Sasha Richardson, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 2020.
Project Demo PDF Code Best Poster, Honorable Mention
RECAST: Interactive Auditing of Automatic Toxicity Detection Models
Austin P. Wright, Omar Shaikh, Haekyu Park, Will Epperson, Muhammed Ahmed, Stephane Pinel, Diyi Yang, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
The Eighth International Workshop of Chinese CHI (ChiCHI). 2020.
Project PDF
CNN 101: Interactive Visual Learning for Convolutional Neural Networks
Zijie J. Wang, Robert Turko, Omar Shaikh, Haekyu Park, Nilaksh Das, Fred Hohman, Minsuk Kahng, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Extended Abstracts on ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). Honolulu, HI, USA, 2020.
Project PDF Video Code
Movement Visualizer for Networked Virtual Reality Platforms
Omar Shaikh, Yilu Sun, Andrea Won
IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR). 2018.
Project PDF Code

Academic Research Experience

Present — Sep. 2022
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Graduate Research Assistant, Stanford HCI and NLP
Advisor: Diyi Yang, Michael Bernstein
May 2022 — Aug. 2018
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Polo Club of Data Science
Advisor: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Diyi Yang
Working at the intersection of HCI and Machine Learning; building interactive interfaces that help explain models.
Summer 2020
University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA (remote)
Research Intern, Natural Language Group
Mentor: Jonathan May
Work on understanding and using monolingual embeddings to improve transfer learning in neural machine translation tasks. Analyzed internal representations for Translation and Language models. Researched why these internal representations forget things, along with methods to mitigate forgetting.
May 2018 — Aug. 2016
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (remote)
Visiting Research Assistant, Virtual Embodiment Lab
Advisor: Andrea Won
Understanding synchrony in virtual environments; built movement trackers for networked VR environments, visualized interpersonal synchrony.

Industry Research Experience

Aug. 2021 — Jan. 2021
Square, Atlanta, GA
Research Intern, Corporate Purpose
Mentor: Felipe Chacon
Modeled seller digitization during the COVID-19 pandemic for millions of transactions over hundreds of thousands of sellers. Work accepted to CSCW 2022.
Summer 2019
Square, Atlanta, GA
Applied Research Intern, Commerce Machine Learning
Mentor: Marsal Gavalda
Built a trending item identification platform (Square Trends), classified items into tax categories. Presented to CEO (Jack Dorsey) + Core after garnering attention on Trends.

Press

Apr. 2021
"This New Tool Can Track the Environmental Cost of Your Machine Learning Model," Georgia Tech, College of Computing
Mar. 2021
"Making Change, Chapter 4: One Year of Payments and the Pandemic," Square, Inc.
Oct. 2020
"Georgia Tech Researchers Contribute 13 Papers to Premier Visualization Conference," Georgia Tech, College of Computing
Nov. 2020
"Being Polite Can Be Essential to Getting a Loan," Georgia Tech, College of Computing
Sep. 2019
"Axe throwing and hard seltzer: Here are 2020's hottest spending trends," CBS News. *probably not very accurate now thanks to COVID :(
Sep. 2019
"20 Predictions for 2020," Square, Inc.

Mentoring

Present — Winter 2023
Ashna Khetan
B.S. in Computer Science, Stanford University
Measuring Conversational Grounding in Large Language Models
Paper accepted to NAACL 2024
Winter 2023 — Fall 2022
Hongxin Zhang
B.S. in Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoning
Paper accepted to ACL 2023
Now: Ph.D. Student at UMass Amherst
Fall 2022 — Spring 2021
Aryan Pariani
B.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Inference
Paper accepted to Findings of ACL 2023

Misc

Reviewer
North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2024
The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2024 (outstanding reviewer)
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2023
Workshop on Visualization for AI Explainability (VISxAI) at IEEE VIS 2022
Institutional
Stanford HCI Seminar Organizer, 2024 - 2023
Georgia Tech Threads Mardi Gras, 2019
Member
2021
Intramural Frisbee Champions @ GT :)
Present — 2018
Serve Learn Sustain Student Ambassador
Present — 2018
Ramblin' Tennis @ Georgia Tech

Skills

Languages: Python, JavaScript, C, Java, C#

Technologies: PyTorch, Node.js, React (Native), Redux, Unity

References

Dr. Diyi Yang, Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department, NLP Group
Stanford University
Dr. Michael Bernstein, Associate Professor
Computer Science Department, HCI Group
Stanford University
Dr. Polo Chau, Associate Professor
School of Computational Science and Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Andrea Won, Associate Professor
Department of Communication
Cornell University