Special Status Faculty

Abu Zaher Md. Faridee, Postdoctoral Research Associate

Abu Zaher Faridee posing for a photo outside with trees in the backgroundDr. Faridee’s professional work and research focus on constructing scalable machine learning models resilient against domain and category shifts with minimal-to-no additional supervision. He primarily engages with deep domain adaptation, unsupervised, self-supervised, adversarial, disentangled representation learning, novel category discovery, and learnable data augmentation techniques, with practical applications in text, audio, and video domains. Dr. Faridee aims to discover the optimal transferability of representations across domains, tasks, and modalities, addressing real-world ML challenges with these methodologies.

At Amazon, Dr. Faridee’s team developed an end-to-end neural machine translation pipeline enhancing Amazon’s customer service experience. He enhanced the robustness of NMT models against noisy, out-of-domain inputs using the aforementioned approaches. In 2021, he interned with Microsoft Research’s Audio and Acoustics Research Group, devising novel deep neural architectures for estimating deep noise suppression model performance.

Before obtaining his Ph.D., Dr. Faridee spent approximately 8 years constructing, assembling, and leading teams in distributed data processing and analytics back-ends, catering to millions of users in the USA and UK. From 2009–2013, he actively contributed to several open-source NLP and ML projects through the Google Summer of Code program, both as a participant and later as a mentor.

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/azmfaridee


Anuradha Ravi, Research Assistant Professor

Anuradha Ravi poses for a photo inside a roomDr. Ravi is a Research Assistant Professor in Information Systems at UMBC. Her research interests include edge computing, developing low-power machine learning models for IoT, IoT-enhanced smart spaces, and wireless networking. Prior to joining UMBC, Dr. Ravi worked as a  Research Scientist (PostDoc) at Singapore Management University (Oct 2018 – Mar 2023). She completed her Ph.D. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India, in 2016. Dr. Ravi was awarded the “SMU Research Excellence” award for her contribution to the “AI-Based Occupancy Aware Smart Building Energy Optimization project,” which includes indoor localization for occupancy sensing in Smart Buildings. She has vast experience building real-time working prototypes to convert research into real-time demonstration.

Personal Website: https://sites.google.com/view/anuradhar

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuradha-ravi-ph-d-36564a3b/


Philip Feldman, M.S. ’14, human-centered computing, and Ph.D. ’20, human-centered computing, Adjunct Research Assistant Professor

Philip Feldman headshot against solid backgroundDr. Feldman has been an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor of Information Systems at UMBC since 2020. He has a diverse and extensive professional background, having served as an AI/ML Futurist at ASRC Federal, Technology Architect at Novetta, Inc, and in various technical and leadership roles at other organizations. His educational background includes a PhD and MS in Human-Centered Computing from UMBC, an MS in Interdisciplinary Studies from Johns Hopkins University, and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Maryland. He has been a speaker at several prominent events and has authored the book “Stampede Theory: Human Nature, Technology, and Runaway Social Realities” published by Elsevier in 2023. Additionally, he has a rich history of publications, speaking engagements, and patents in the fields of AI, machine learning, and human-centered computing. His research interests include societal-scale AI conflict, intelligent control systems, simulation, ethics, and the impact of technology on society.

Personal Website: https://philfeldman.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phil-feldman-phd/