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
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.
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2024.
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.
Computational Linguistics (CL). 2023.
61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). 2023.
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.
The 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). 2022.
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.
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP Findings). 2020.
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.
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.
Public Library of Science (PLoS One). 2019.
International Society for Presence Research Annual Conference (PRESENCE). 2018.
Posters & Extended Abstracts
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR). 2018.
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
B.S. in Computer Science, Stanford University
Measuring Conversational Grounding in Large Language Models
Paper accepted to NAACL 2024
Winter 2023 — Fall 2022
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
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