I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at SUNY Albany. My research interests include data mining and machine learning with a focus on human-centered applications, such as recommender systems, educational systems, and online social networks. Check my research for more specific topics.

I received my PhD and Master's in Intelligent Systems Program from the University of Pittsburgh, my Master's in Computer Engineering from University of Tehran, and my Bachelor's in Computer Science/Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. More details can be found in my CV.

We have multiple open positions. If you are interested, take a look at opportunities -- funded open positions.

News:

• 04/2021: Honored to receive NSF CAREER award for the project "CAREER: Time-Aware Multi-Objective Recommendation in Online Learning Environments" (project link)
• 04/2021: Congrats Chunpai and Siqian for their paper accepted at EDM’2021 conference, titled “Learning from non-assessed resources: Deep multi-type knowledge tracing”
• 04/2021: Congrats Miley and Siqian for their paper accepted at The AIED’2021 conference, titled “Temporal processes associating with procrastination dynamics”
• 03/2021: Congrats Chunpai, Siqian, and Laura for their collaborative paper accepted at UMAP’2021 conference, titled “Knowledge tracing for complex problemsolving: Granular rank-based tensor factorization”
• 01/2021: Congrats Miley and Siqian for their collaborative paper accepted at The Web’2021 conference, titled “Stimuli-Sensitive Hawkes Processes for Personalized Student Procrastination Modeling”
• 12/2020: Congrats Miley and Siqian for their collaborative paper accepted at AAAI’2021 conference, titled “Relaxed clustered hawkes process for procrastination modeling in MOOCs”
• 10/2020: Congrats Mehrdad for accepted paper at WI’2020 conference, titled “Sb-dnmf: A structure based discriminative non-negative matrix factorization model for detecting inefficient learning behaviors”
• 10/2020: Glad to be serving as program co-chair for EDM 2021 (EDM 2020)
• 09/2020: Our paper “TransCrossCF: Transition-based cross-domain collaborative filtering” was accepted in ICMLA 2020!
• 10/2018: Glad to be serving as proceeding co-chair for RecSys 2020 (RecSys 2020)
• 08/2019: Congratulations to Dr. Mehrdad Mirzaei for successfully defending his dissertation on "Discriminative Factorization Models for Student Behavioral Pattern Detection and Classification". He is the first PhD graduate of our lab!
• 07/2019: Congratulations to Siqian and Chunpai! Our paper "Modeling Knowledge Acquisition from Multiple LearningResource Types" has been accepted to EDM 2020
• 07/2019: Congratulations to Miley! Our paper "Analyzing Student Procrastination in MOOCs: A Multivariate Hawkes Approach" has been accepted to EDM 2020
• 07/2019: Congratulations to Mehrdad! Our paper "Detecting Trait versus Performance Student Behavioral Pattern Using Discriminative Non-Negative Matrix Factorization" has been accepted to FLAIRS 2019
• 07/2019: Congratulations to Nam! Our paper "Review-Based Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering: A Neural Framework" has been accepted to ComplexRec 2019
• 05/2019: Awarded, along with Dr. Reza Feyzi Behnagh, for the NSF CyberLearning project "Detecting and Predicting Procrastination in Online and Social Learning" (project link)
• 04/2019: Congratulations to Thanh Nam Doan! His paper"Rank-Based Tensor Factorization for Predicting Student Performance" has been accepted to Educational Data Mining 2019
• 03/2019: Congratulations to Mehrdad Mirzaei! His paper "Annotated Examples and Parameterized Exercises: Analyzing Student's Sequential Patterns" has been accepted to AI in Education 2019
• 10/2018: Glad to be serving as publicity co-chair for RecSys 2019 (RecSys 2019)
• 04/2018: Awarded for the NSF CRII project "Modeling Student Knowledge and Improving Performance when Learning from Multiple Types of Materials" (project link)
• 03/2018: Research Paper "Student Performance Prediction by Discovering Inter-Activity Relations" has been accepted in Educational Data Mining 2018 (link)
• 03/2018: The 2nd Workshop on Intelligent Recommender Systems by Knowledge Transfer and Learning (RecSysKTL) has been accepted in ACM RecSys Conference (RecSysKTL 2018)
• 02/2018: Selected as Fall 2017 FRAP-A Award recipient for research on Cross-Domain Recommender Systems.
• 02/2018: Program Committee member for the 11th ACM Recommender Systems Conference (RecSys), 2018 (RecSys 2018)
• 10/2017: Glad to be serving as student volunteer chair for RecSys 2018 (RecSys 2018)
• 09/2017: Program Committee member for the 8th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2017)
• 08/2017: Program Committee member for the 33rd ACM SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing - RecSys track (ACM SAC 2018)
• 08/2017: Program Committee member for the Web (WWW) conference - User Modeling Personalization and Experience Track (WWW 2018)
• 07/2017: "Cross-domain recommendation for large-scale data" has been accepted to RecSysKTL 2017
• 04/2017: Program Committee member for the 11th ACM Recommender Systems Conference (RecSys), 2017 (RecSys 2017)
• 03/2017: Program Committee member for the 1st Temporal and Holistic User Modeling Workshop (THUM), co-Located with UMAP 2017 (THUM 2017)
• 03/2017: Program Committee member for the 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) (EDM 2017)
• 02/2017: The 1st Workshop on Intelligent Recommender Systems by Knowledge Transfer and Learning (RecSysKTL) has been accepted in ACM RecSys Conference (RecSysKTL 2017)