Sarah Masud
Rising Star
India
LCS2, IIIT-Delhi
Sarah is a 4th-year doctoral student at the Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2) at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India. Her Ph.D. is supported by the illustrious and highly selective Prime Minister Doctoral Research Fellowship (100 students across India). Within the broad area of social computing, her work mainly revolves around Hate Speech Detection & Diffusion on the web. Her research has been published in top-tier conferences and journals like ICDE, KDD, CSUR, SIGWEB, and TKDD. Prior to joining academia, she worked as a data scientist in developer tooling at Red Hat for 2.5 years. The work revolved around providing developer analytics to the OpenShift.io platform. Before that, she obtained her Bachelor in Technology in CSE from Jamia Millia Islamia. She is currently a member of AnitaB.org’s AI Membership Committee and a reviewer with the Journal of Open Source Software, having reviewed 10+ projects since 2020.
About the industry and my career
Multiple factors have contributed to my journey in STEAM. To begin with, I grew up in a household where education was given utmost importance and studying science was encouraged. Every month from 6th to 12th grade, I read the Science Reporter Magazine in awe of scientific discoveries and phenomena. It led me to pursue STEM in high school, opt for engineering as an undergraduate. Secondly, I have been fortunate to be mentored by some amazing colleagues. Over the years, they have guided me and actively encouraged me to take up technically challenging projects. Thirdly, I strongly and passionately believe that technology, especially machine learning-inspired tech, can help develop a more democratic and equitable world where the lack of human resources and outreach can be filled by personalized computational services offline and online. However, there are two sides to a coin, and before we can build trustworthy machine learning models, we need to understand their harms and the harms that can be provided via them. This led me to pursue a Ph.D. in social computing, focusing on internet-based harms. I hope someday, a part of my research inspires building better online spaces for minority and vulnerable groups.
Since my undergraduate days, I have been a strong proponent of open source and open access. My support for the latter became more acute when I joined academia and realized the disparity in public access to research material (papers, datasets, code, etc.). Technology cannot be developed, audited, and deployed in isolation. It requires input from a diverse group of people with different expertise. In short, STEAM is all about transparency, interdisciplinary synergy, and harboring diversity for developing holistic solutions.
Since my undergraduate days, I have been a strong proponent of open source and open access. My support for the latter became more acute when I joined academia and realized the disparity in public access to research material (papers, datasets, code, etc.). Technology cannot be developed, audited, and deployed in isolation. It requires input from a diverse group of people with different expertise. In short, STEAM is all about transparency, interdisciplinary synergy, and harboring diversity for developing holistic solutions.
About a Women that Build values
Ideally, I would like to believe it is not about Women that Build but rather a Person that Builds as progress for Women in STEAM cannot be without support for all minority groups in STEAM. Thus, Women that Build is someone who keeps while being a trailblazer and also encourages and mentors other women/minority representatives in STEAM. Not only technically but also by providing a safe space for others around them to express and share their creative ideas and suggestions. In an environment that may not be immediately conducive to her, apart from being technically sound, women who build need to be good at speaking up, taking charge, and negating. They must actively work on their mental and emotional strength to be their cheerleaders.
About my future
As a computer engineer, my social computing research has largely focused on understanding and analyzing hate speech from a computational perspective. For the next five years, I plan to perform more interdisciplinary studies and bring social science aspects to understanding hate speech as well as broader areas of machine-generated biases and stereotypes. A holistic understanding of these biases will prompt my research into making these ML drive platforms and systems less harmful and more accessible when deployed.
While I continue to embark on my research and development journey, I inspire more young women to follow a STEAM career by largely extending my support via mentoring, reviewing, and presenting. I have had the opportunity to mentor young females through various technical and non-technical programs. Besides, since 2016, she has spoken/presented at 30+ technical and non-technical venues. Having my proposal and scholarship accepted at multiple venues, I gained a fair idea about the reviewing process involved at such venues. Hence, I actively serve as a program committee member and reviewer for various academic and industry conferences.
A complete list of my mentoring and reviewing services is respectively available here https://sara-02.github.io/mentor/ and here https://sara-02.github.io/services/. Further, all my presentation material is publicly available here https://github.com/sara-02/pradarshan.
While I continue to embark on my research and development journey, I inspire more young women to follow a STEAM career by largely extending my support via mentoring, reviewing, and presenting. I have had the opportunity to mentor young females through various technical and non-technical programs. Besides, since 2016, she has spoken/presented at 30+ technical and non-technical venues. Having my proposal and scholarship accepted at multiple venues, I gained a fair idea about the reviewing process involved at such venues. Hence, I actively serve as a program committee member and reviewer for various academic and industry conferences.
A complete list of my mentoring and reviewing services is respectively available here https://sara-02.github.io/mentor/ and here https://sara-02.github.io/services/. Further, all my presentation material is publicly available here https://github.com/sara-02/pradarshan.