Zahra Fatemi

About me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), advised by Professor Elena Zheleva. My research interests lie at the intersection of Causal Inference, Machine Learning, and Experimentation. In addition, I have a strong background in time series forecasting and extensive experience in Large Language Models (LLMs) Pretraining. I am currently (2023) on the job market and actively seeking research opportunities.

I received my Master's degree in Network Science from University of Tehran, where I was advised by Professor Mostafa Salehi. During my M.Sc., I focused on proposing a pipeline to reveal and visualize hidden structures in networks.

News

August 2023: I will be presenting our work titled "Network Experiment Design for Diffusion Modeling" at KDD PhD Consortium.

July 2023: I will be presenting my joint work with Salesforce Research titled "Improving Gender Fairness of Pre-trained Language Models without Catastrophic Forgetting" at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics(ACL).

June 2023: I presented our paper "Contagion Effect Estimation using Proximal Embeddings" as a poster at IDEAL Annual Meeting.

May 2023: I presented our paper "Contagion Effect Estimation using Proximal Embeddings" as a poster at the Midwest Machine Learning Symposium (MMLS).

August 2022: I presented our paper "Understanding Stay-at-home Attitudes through Framing Analysis of Tweets" at IEEE/ACM Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA).

August 2020: I will be presenting our paper "Network Experiment Design for Estimating Direct Treatment Effects" at KDD workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs (MLG).

July 2020: I will present our paper "Minimizing Interference and Selection Bias in Network Experiment Design" as a poster at WiML Un-Workshop at 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

June 2020: I am honored to receive Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) Scholarship.

June 2020: I will present our paper "Minimizing Interference and Selection Bias in Network Experiment Design" at 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).

Publications

Improving Gender Fairness of Pre-trained Language Models without Catastrophic Forgetting
Zahra Fatemi, Chen Xing, Wenhao Liu, Caiming Xiong
The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2023 . PDF.

Systems and Methods for Refining Pre-trained Language Models with Improved Gender Fairness
Zahra Fatemi, Chen Xing, Wenhao Liu, Caiming Xiong
U.S. Patent 2023 . PDF.

Network Experiment Designs for Inferring Causal Effects under Interference
Zahra Fatemi, Elena Zheleva
Frontiers in Big Data 2023. PDF.

Contagion Effect Estimation Using Proximal Embeddings
Zahra Fatemi, Elena Zheleva
Under Review. PDF.

Mitigating Cold-start Forecasting using Cold Causal Demand Forecasting Model
Zahra Fatemi, Minh Huynh, Elena Zheleva, Zamir Syed, Xiaojun Di
Under Review. PDF.

Understanding Stay-at-home Attitudes through Framing Analysis of Tweets
Zahra Fatemi, Abari Bhattacharya, Andrew Wentzel, Vipul Dhariwal, Lauren Levine, Andrew Rojecki, G. Elisabeta Marai, Barbara Di Eugenio, Elena Zheleva
IEEE/ACM Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA) 2022. PDF. Data.

Non-Parametric Inference of Relational Dependence
Ragib Ahsan, Zahra Fatemi, David Arbour, Elena Zheleva
38th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2022 . PDF.

Minimizing Interference and Selection Bias in Network Experiment Design
Zahra Fatemi, Elena Zheleva
14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2020. Best Paper Honorable Mention. PDF.

Network Experiment Design for Estimating Direct Treatment Effects
Zahra Fatemi, Elena Zheleva
KDD Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs (MLG) 2020. PDF.

A Generalized Force-Directed Layout for Multiplex Sociograms
Zahra Fatemi, Mostafa Salehi, Matteo Magnani
10th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo) 2018. PDF.

Experience

June 2022-September 2022: Research Intern - Google

June 2021-September 2021: Research Intern - Salesforce Research

February 2017-April 2017 Data Science Intern - Rocoland

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';