About

News & Updates

I am Md Mofijul (Akash) Islam, Applied Scientist II, AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Virginia (Thesis: Multimodal and Multitask Representation Learning for Perceiving Human Behavior and Embodied). I was an ESE-UVA Bicentennial Fellow (2019-2020). I worked at the Link Lab with Prof. Tariq Iqbal. Previously, I worked as a Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Dhaka. I completed my M.S. and B.Sc(Hons) in Computer Science and Engineering from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Dhaka.

My research interest broadly lies at the intersection of multimodal and multi-task learning, self-supervised learning, and Human-Centered AI. I also explore human/animal multisensory systems from a neuroscience perspective to design multimodal learning approaches.

I love to write code with background music and participate in hackathons, programming, and software contests. During my free time, I like to travel to new places.

Updates

  • 16 Jan 2024: Super Excited!!! EQA-MX is accepted as SPOTLIGHT in ICLR-2024
  • 06 Nov 2023: Joined AWS Generative AI Innovation Center as Applied Scientist II
  • 30 June 2023: PhD Done !!!!!!!
  • 10 Feb 2023: Excited! I have been accepted to Google’s Computer Science Research Mentorship Program (CSRMP)
  • 20 Jan 2023: Our work “Representation Learning in Deep RL via Discrete Information Bottleneck,” has been accepted in AISTATS 2023) [Paper]
  • 21 Dec 2022: Received AAAI-23 scholarship
  • 05 Dec 2022: My Ph.D. thesis has been accepted to the WACV 2023 Doctoral Consortium and received award to attend!
  • 02 Nov 2022: Excited!!! I received UVA Engineering Endowed Fellowship** (Fall 2022 - Spring 2023)
  • 07 Oct 2022: I have received NeurIPS-2022 Scholar Award !!!
  • 16 Sep 2022: Excited !!! Our work “CAESAR: An Embodied Simulator for Generating Multimodal Referring Expression Datasets ,” has been accepted in NeurIPS 2022 (Track on Datasets and Benchmarks) [Paper]
  • 11 Sep 2022: I am attending Ubicomp-2022 to present our work M3Sense !!!
  • 06 March 2022: Our work “M3Sense: Affect-Agnostic Multitask Representation Learning using Multimodal Wearable Sensors,” has been accepted in ACM IMWUT/Ubicomp 2022 [Video Presentation]
  • 28 March 2022: Our work “A Vocabulary-Free Multilingual Neural Tokenizer for End-to-End Task Learning” has been accepted in ACL Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP 2022.
  • 22 March 2022: Our work “MAVEN: A Memory Augmented Recurrent Approach for Multimodal Fusion,” has been accepted in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia [Video Presentation]
  • 07-10 March 2020: Student Volunteer at HRI-2020
  • 04 Feb 2022: Received Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference Scholarship (2022)
  • 03 Dec 2021: Our work “iSpy a Humorous Robot: Evaluating the Perceptions of Humor Types in a Robot Partner,” has been accepted in AAAI Spring 2022 Symposium
  • 01 Dec 2021: Our work “MuMu: Cooperative Multitask Learning-based Guided Multimodal Fusion,” has been accepted in AAAI (Main Track: Oral) [Pre-print] [Video Presentation] [Flash Talk]
  • Nov 29 2021: Our work “Who’s Laughing NAO? Examining Perceptions of Failure in a Humorous Robot Partner,” has been accepted in HRI-2022
  • 04 Oct 2021: Excited!!! I received UVA Engineering Endowed Fellowship (2021-2022)
  • 03 May 2021: I will join Amazon Alexa AI team as summer-2021 Applied Scientist Intern**
  • 02 May 2021: I will volunteer ICLR-2021
  • 29 Jan 2021: Our work, “Multi-GAT: A Graphical Attention-based Hierarchical Multimodal Representation Learning Approach for Human Activity Recognition”, has been accepted in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). [Paper] [Video Demo]
  • 06-12 Dec 2020: Student Volunteer at NeurIPS-2020
  • 12-18 Jul 2020: Student Volunteer at ICML-2020
  • 30 Jun 2020: Excited !!! My first PhD work, “HAMLET: A Hierarchical Multimodal Attention-based Human Activity Recognition”, has been accepted in IROS-2020. [Video Presentation]
  • 26 Aug 2019: Received ESE-UVA Bicentennial Fellowship (2019-2020)
  • 16 Aug 2019: Moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, US to start my PhD study at University of Virginia. Keep my in your prayers :)
  • 05 June 2019: Received a scholarship to attend Locomotion and Navigation from Flies to Robots, in Trieste, Italy from 29 April 2019 to 10 May 2019.(couldn’t able to attend due to the Visa issue)
  • 09 Apr 2019: Two papers accepted in TENSYMP 2019
  • 03 Apr 2019: Received a small research grant from University Grants Commission(UGC), Bangladesh Government for a research project:Domain Adaptive Transfer Learning for Multi-task Learning Model
  • 11 Mar 2019: Accepted into Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral School 2019(05-10 August 2019), Saarbrücken, Germany
  • 04 Mar 2019: “A Gray Box Interpretable Visual Debugging Approach for Deep Sequence Learning Model”, accepted in ICLR-2019 Workshop: Debugging Machine Learning Models
  • 04 Mar 2019: Received a scholarship to attend 7th Workshop on Collaborative Scientific Software Development to be held at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), in Trieste, Italy from 29 April 2019 to 10 May 2019.
  • 11 Feb 2019: “NEWSTRADCOIN: A Blockchain Based Privacy Preserving Secure NEWS Trading Network”, accepted in IC-BCT 2019.
  • 22 Jan 2019: “Two Phase Authentication and VPN Based Secured Communication for IoT Home Networks”, accepted in MIND-2019.
  • 23 Nov 2018: “A Hierarchical Learning Model for Claim Validation.” accepted in IJCCI-2018
  • 31 Aug 2018: “BARD: Bangla Article Classification using a New Comprehensive Dataset.” accepted in ICBSLP-2018
  • 01 Jul 2018: Second Runner-up in True Augmented Reality Challenge-2018.
  • 15 Apr 2018: “iProtGly-SS: IdentifyingProtein Lysine Glycation Sites Using Sequence and Structure Based Features”. Accepted in Proteins Journal-2018.
  • 22nd Dec 2017: Received NVIDIA Academic GPU Grant
  • 27th Nov 2017: “RAiTA: Recommending Accepted Answer using Textual Metadata”, accepted in Springer IEMIS-2018
  • 18th Nov 2017: “VIM: A Big Data Analytics Tool for Data Visualization and Knowledge Mining”, accepted in IEEE WIECON-ECE-2017
  • 11th Nov 2017: attended International Collegiate Programming Contest-2017(Dhaka Regional) as a coach
  • 10th Sep 2017: Joined Dept. of CSE, University Dhaka. I spend a great time with students and dear colleagues at United International University.
  • 09th Sep 2017: Conducted a workshop on IEEEXtreme11.0 at United International University.
  • 11th Jun 2017: Conducted a session on Kotlin at Google I/O Replay Dhaka-2017.
  • 27th May 2017: Published journal, Mobile Cloud-Based Big Healthcare Data Processing in Smart Cities, in IEEE Access
  • 24-25th Mar 2017: Arranged Intra-university CSE Fest 2017 at United International University.
  • 09-10th Mar 2017: Attended NCPC(National Collegiate Programming Contest)-2017 as a Coach at CUET.
  • 14th Jan 2017: Conducted a workshop on Android Mobile Application Development at University of Dhaka.
  • 7-9th Jan 2017: Attended NSysS-2016 Conference, BUET, Dhaka, Bangladesh