Dr. Rashidul Islam joined Visa Research as a Staff Research Scientist in August 2022. Rashidul received his Ph.D. in Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in 2022, and M.Sc. in Information Systems at UMBC in 2020. Before that, he also received M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, and B.Sc. in Applied Physics, Electronics and Communication Engineering at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Prior to joining Visa Research, Rashidul was a Research Assistant at Foulds Research Group, UMBC with a focus on intersectional approach for fair machine learning .
As a member of the trustworthy AI team, his research interests are in the broader field of AI and ML, particularly in the area of AI Fairness and Ethics. It is now well understood that AI systems frequently behave unfairly and discriminatorily toward specific demographic groups when trained on data without the proper attention. Various AI-automated tasks may suffer negative societal effects as a result of this phenomenon. Rashidul’s research is focused on building socially responsible machine learning methods by modeling, measuring, and correcting unfairness or implicit bias. He has published several works in top conferences such as AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics and Society (AIES), The Web Conference (formerly known as WWW), ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), and others.