Ph.D Candidate
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Room: 5166, DGP Lab, 40 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 2E4
rifat [at] cs [dot] toronto [dot] edu
[CV] [Google Scholar] [DBLP]
Ethics in AI: Incorporating Ethical Diversity in Computing and AI Systems
Ethics: What computing technologies are in conflict or confluence with religious values, ethics, and practices? How the recognition of religious and spiritual ethics advance HCI agendas? [CHI 2022] [COMPASS 2021] [CSCW 2020] [IslamicHCI@CHI 2020] [CHI 2017]
Politics: How the tensions between computing and religion are connected to various national and international politics and sustainability goals? [CHI 2022] [CSCW 2022]
Pluralism: How can computing technologies recognize and address ethical pluralism? [CSCW 2023] [CSCW 2020] [COMPASS 2021]
Inspiration: Jürgen Habermas, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Charles Taylor, Charles Hirschkind, Edward Goldsmith, Søren Kierkegaard, Ashis Nandy, Arturo Escobar, Veena Das, Carol Gilligan, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, among others.
Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) for Online Safety
Cohabitant: How AR and VR applications break interfaith stereotypes, increase connection, and inspire learning among ethnoreligious communities? [CHI 2024]
Venting Machine: How culturally and normatively appropriate VR applications combined with LLMs can reduce negative emotions and provide mental health support.
Inspiration: Gordon Allport, Thomas Pettigrew, Ashis Nandy, Veena Das, Sara Ahmed, and Alasdair MacIntyre, among others.
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Deep Learning-based Community Supported Tools to Reduce Online Hatred
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Islamophobic Racism: How can we leverage traditional and community based peace-building practices to moderate Islamophobic racism? [TSC]
Interpretation and justification: How faith-based rationales shape the interpretations and justification of categorizing harmful posts online? [Student Engagement Award - University of Toronto]
Design: How can we apply computational techniques and design to explore and mitigate issues related to bias, misinformation, and intolerance? [CHI 2022 workshop on Religion, Faith, and Spirituality]
Inspiration: Veena Das, Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, Ashis Nandy, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others.
Big Data in the Global South
Decolonizing data science: How can data-driven and AI technologies be adapted to be inclusive of local cultures, contexts, and knowledge practices in the Global South?[FAccT 2022] [Desirable AI 2023] [Mozilla Festival 2022]
Vio-Lens: How online and societal violence are heavily influenced and shaped by religious and postcolonial contexts in Global South? How can we build methodologies and AI tools to mitigate online harms in these unique contexts? [CHI 2024 - under review] [EMNLP 2023 workshop on Bangla Language Processing]
Inspiration: Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Nick Couldry, Frantz Fanon, Max Liboiron, and Payal Arora, among others.
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Sustainable Computing: Repair, Re-use, and Recycle
Though repair, maintainability, and e-waste processing play an important role in re-using broken devices and creating employment in third-world countries, it rarely gets theoretical importance. Our several year-long ethnographic and design studies report the learning, collaboration, skills, craft, and safety of repairers, recyclers, and e-waste processors. [CHI 2019] [ICTD 2016] [ICTD 2015] [DIS 2014] [SOUPS 2014]
Inspiration: Richard Sennet, David Rosenbaum, Sarah Pink, Michael Polanyi, Tim Ingold, and Daniel Miller, among others.
Thanks to my my mentors and collaborators in these projects.