Hello. I'm Osama.

email: [firstname]-[lastname] [at] uiowa [dot] edu

Osama

About

I am currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science and an MA in Linguistics at the University of Iowa.

My research deals with the intersection of technology and society, understanding how social mores evolve with evolving technology. My work primarily looks at how language develops in online spaces and how it is used by online communities to construct their identities.

I spent the summer of 2023 interning with Google's Knowledge Engine Team at Mountain View, hosted by Wenchao Jiang and Martin Wan.
In the summer of 2022, I interned at Google's PAIR team in Seattle and was hosted by Dan Liebling and Katherine Heller.

You can find my resume here (EN) or here (UR).


Publications

Osama Khalid, and Padmini Srinivasan. "Smells like Teen Spirit: An Exploration of Sensorial Style in Language" Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 2022.[paper][video]

Osama Khalid, Jonathan Rusert, and Padmini Srinivasan. "Suum Cuique: Studying Bias in Taboo Detection with a Community Perspective." Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-IJCNLP) 2022.[paper] [video]

Osama Khalid, and Padmini Srinivasan. "Style Matters! Investigating Linguistic Style in Online Communities." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 14. 2020. [paper] [video]

Rusert, Jonathan, Osama Khalid, Dat Hong, Zubair Shafiq, and Padmini Srinivasan. "No Place to Hide: Inadvertent Location Privacy Leaks on Twitter." Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2019, no. 4 (2019): 172-189. [paper]

Projects

I occasionally make things. These are some of those.

2023: National arXiv is an experimental search engine for the National Assembly Debates archives of Pakistan. (Currently covering: 1947-2022). [link]

2021: I made a little language game which involves guessing the word based on its TokiPona translation. [link]

2021: I took part in Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon 2021 and helped create a Language Accessibility Metric for the Worker Friendliness Index. [link]

2021: MausiqiBot: A twitter bot that posts a spatio-temporally random song every twenty-four hours.[link] [Dead!]

2021: Frequency of Letters in Urdu Words and Where they Occur: An Infographic.[link][tweet]

2020: Hobson-Jobson: An online and searchable version of the 19th Century lexicon.[link]


Teaching

Over the years, I have been involved in teaching in various capacities:

2022-2023: I was a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Center for Teaching.

March 2023: As part of my Graduate Teaching Fellowship I designed and conducted a workshop on teaching practices called Learn from your Teaching.

2020-2021: I was a recipient of the Computer Science Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.

2017-2023: I have TA-ed for around 15 courses in the last 7 years. You can find feedback from the instructors and the students here.