MUHAMMAD ALI

ABOUT

My name is Ali and I am a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Northeastern University, where I am fortunate to be co-advised by Alan Mislove and Christo Wilson. I am interested in concretely measuring bias and possible discriminatory behavior in modern machine learning algorithms, to help engineer better systems for the future. My current work revolves around measuring these issues in internet advertising.

I am spending Summer 2022 at Oracle Labs, working on measuring linguistic biases in large language models. Previously, I've interned at Intel, where I worked on generating model cards and explanations for their repository of ML models.

Before Northeastern, I got my master's degree in computer science at Saarland University, where I was a member of Krishna Gummadi's Networked Systems group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

PUBLICATIONS

• All Things Unequal: Measuring Disparity of Potentially Harmful Ads on Facebook
  Muhammad Ali, Angelica Goetzen, Alan Mislove, Elissa Redmiles, Piotr Sapiezynski
  Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection (ConPro '22), San Francisco, CA, May 2022.
  


• Ad Delivery Algorithms: The Hidden Arbiters of Political Messaging
  Muhammad Ali*, Piotr Sapiezynski*, Aleksandra Korolova, Alan Mislove, Aaron Rieke
  Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM '21), Virtual, March 2021.
  
  Press: Washington Post, WIRED, New Scientist


• Discrimination through optimization: How Facebook's ad delivery can lead to skewed outcomes
  Muhammad Ali*, Piotr Sapiezynski*, Miranda Bogen, Aleksandra Korolova, Alan Mislove, Aaron Rieke
  Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '19) Austin, TX, USA, November 2019.
  Diversity and Inclusion Award, Honorable Mention
  
  Press: Vox, The Economist, WIRED, The Intercept, MIT Technology Review, The Verge, Motherboard, and erm... Breitbart


• Measuring Bias in Facebook's Ad-Targeting Attributes
  Muhammad Ali
  Master's thesis, Saarbrücken, Germany, August 2018.


• Potential for Discrimination in Online Targeted Advertising
  Till Speicher, Muhammad Ali, Giridhari Venkatadri, George Arvanitakis, Krishna P. Gummadi, Patrick Loiseau, and Alan Mislove
  Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*), New York City, New York, February 2018.
  Best Paper Nominee
  


• On Quantifying Knowledge Segregation in Society
  Abhijnan Chakraborty, Muhammad Ali, Saptarshi Ghosh, Niloy Ganguly, and Krishna P. Gummadi
  Proceedings of the FATREC Workshop on Responsible Recommendation (colocated with RecSys 2017), Como, Italy, August 2017.

MISC.

Back home in Lahore, Pakistan, I did my undergrad in computer science at FAST-NUCES. My Twitter handle is the name of the neighborhood in Lahore where I grew up.

The font for all headings on this homepage is inspired by Ed Ruscha W.E.B. Du Bois – who used data visualizations as a way to communicate social injustices.

Outside of work, I enjoy reading, running, indie video games and music. I am an student of the tabla – it's something I picked up very late in life but am currently refusing to give up. I have an unhealthy habit of re-reading Bill Watterson's commencement speech, and re-watching Kogonada's Columbus.