Hi!

This is Miftahul Jannat Mokarrama, a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Northern Illinois University. Currently, I am working at the DATA Lab with Dr. Hamed Alhoori. My research focus falls in several exciting and ever-growing fields of Data Science and Science of Science, especially in the intersections of data mining & analytics, machine learning, computational social science, and recommender systems. My long-term goal is to work to reduce the gap between researchers and policymakers for increased societal research impact. Therefore, I am focusing on building my caliber both in the underlying theories and practical use cases associated with this domain by modeling real-world (linear/non-linear) data, exploring state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing(NLP) Techniques, Machine Learning Algorithms, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Statistical Methods.

Technical Skills

Programming Languages: Python, SQL, C/C++, XML, Java-Script, Java, PHP, HTML/CSS, LATEX, Prolog.
Libraries/Frameworks: Numpy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Gensim, Spacy, NLTK, Keras, PyTorch, TensorFlow.
Tools/IDEs: PyCharm, VS Code, Git/GitHub, Unix Shell, Notebooks (Jupyter/Observable).
Database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, DuckDB.

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science Northern Illinois University (August 2021 - present)
M.Sc., Computer Science Northern Illinois University (December 2023)
B.Sc.(Engg.), Computer Science & Engineering Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology (CUET) (March 2017)

Professional Experience

Graduate Teaching Assistant @ Northern Illinois University (January 2025 - present, August 2021 - December 2023)

Graded weekly quizzes and assignments, evaluated term-exam answer scripts/projects of 500+ students.
Held office hours to mentor students in better understanding the topics.
Provided one-to-one constructive feedback in-person/online as per their performance.

Graduate Research Assistant @ Northern Illinois University (Spring 2024 - Fall 2024, Summer 2022, Summer 2023)

Drafted, published, and presented research papers in several conferences on youth research uptakes in the US policy.
Assisted in investigating project use-cases, modeling research, and organizing writing for a grant proposal to NSF on research policy gaps.
Increased model performance from 50% to 75% utilizing several readability and lexical diversity metrics for classifying policy citations.

Lecturer @ Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Port City International University (PCIU), Chittagong, Bangladesh (July 2017 - July 2021)

Designed course materials, syllabi, and lesson plans and delivered lectures, tutorials, and laboratory sessions.
Faculty Advisor @ PCIU Computer Club.
Co-chair @ Web and Media Committee, ICSDTIR-2021.
Organized seminars, prepared workloads, scheduled exam routines, etc. for the Department.

Talks

LLMs as Judges - NIU AI/ML Workshop, Spring 2025.
Are Research Articles Cited in Relevant Policy Documents? A Quantitative Analysis - ICSSI’24, National Academy of Science, Washington, D. C.

Publications

1. MJ Mokarrama, H Alhoori. Building an Interpretable Policy Citation Prediction Model on Textual Features of the Research Articles. ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Dec 16-20, 2024, Hong Kong. Link.

2. MJ Mokarrama, AR Shaikh, H Alhoori. Examining the Representation of Youth in the US Policy Documents through the Lens of Research. 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data(BigData), Washington, DC, USA, 2024, pp. 2355-2359. Link.

3. MJ Mokarrama, H Alhoori. Quantifying the Relevance of Youth Research Cited in the US Policy Documents. 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), Washington, DC, USA, 2024, pp. 5271-5280. Link.

4. MJ Mokarrama, S Khatun, MS Arefin. A content-based recommender system for choosing universities. Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, vol. 28 (4), 2128-2142, 2020. Link.

5. MJ Mokarrama, MS Arefin. RSF: A recommendation system for farmers. IEEE Region 10 Humanitarian Technology Conference (R10-HTC), 843-850, 2017, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Link.

6. AN Shihab, MJ Mokarrama,R Karim, S Khatun, MS Arefin. An IoT-Based Heart Disease Detection System Using RNN. International Conference on Image Processing and Capsule Networks, vol. 1200, 535-545, 2020, Bangkok, Thailand. Link.

7. A Islam, MJ Mokarrama, MS Arefin, R Karim. Developing a Framework to Identify Potential Firms for Job Assignment. International Conference on Image Processing and Capsule Networks, vol. 1200, 584-593, 2020, Bangkok, Thailand. Link.

8. J Ferdows, S Khatun, MJ Mokarrama, MS Arefin. A Framework for Checking Plagiarized Contents in Programs Submitted at Online Judging Systems. International Conference on Image Processing and Capsule Networks, vol. 1200, 546-560, 2020, Bangkok, Thailand. Link.

9. MM Islam, MS Arefin, S Khatun, MJ Mokarrama, AM Mahi. Developing an IoT-Based Water Pollution Monitoring System. International Conference on Image Processing and Capsule Networks, vol. 1200, 561-573, 2020, Bangkok, Thailand. Link.

Academic Services

Reviewer: ACL SDProc, IC2S2, COLING, WebSci, International Journal on Digital Libraries, The Journal of Supercomputing (2024 - 2025).
Judge: Engineering discipline, NIU Conference on Undergraduate Research & Engagement (2024, 2025).
Research Mentor: Undergraduate Research Rookie, DATA Lab, NIU (August 2022 - May 2023).
Graduate Member: Student Advisory Board, Department of CS, NIU (August 2022 - December 2023).
Student Volunteer (Online): RecSys 2022 (September 18-23, 2022).
Mentor: Q3 1:1 Mentoring Program (July 2022 - September 2022).

Leadership

Program Committee Member: WebSci’25, New Jersey, USA (2025).
Session Chair (Text Analysis): JCDL’24, Hong Kong (Dec. 2024).
Graduate Member: Student Advisory Board, Department of CS, NIU (Aug. 2022 - Dec. 2023).
Co-Chair: Web and Media Sub-Committee, ICSDTIR-2021, Chattogram, Bangladesh (Dec. 2020 - Mar. 2021).
Faculty Coordinator: PCIU Computer Club, Chattogram, Bangladesh (Jul. 2019 - Jul. 2021).

Honors & Awards

NSF Travel Grant Award: IEEE BigData’24 (Nov 2024).
SIGIR Travel Grant Award: ACM/IEEE JCDL’24 (Oct 2024).
Graduate Student Travel Grant: Northern Illinois University (2024).
Grace Hopper Celebration Student Scholarship (GHC-22): AnitaB.org (Jun 2022).
1st Runner-Up; National Girls Programming Contest (NGPC): Dhaka, Bangladesh (Nov 2015).
Best Female Team: Inter-University Programming Contest, Chittagong region, Bangladesh (2014, 2015).
Govt. Merit Scholarship: Ministry of Education, Bangladesh (2007-2017).

Latest News…

March 28, 2024: Presented a research topic on “LLMs as Judges,” a trending subject in the field of large language models in NIU AI/ML Workshop. Check out the Video
Thrilled to share that both of my research presented in IEEE Big Data 2024 has been featured in a Overton blog! Check it out here!
Conducted a session on Text Analysis in JCDL'24!
October 19, 2024: Our paper "Quantifying the Relevance of Youth Research Cited in the US Policy Documents”, 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), co-authored by Dr. Hamed Alhoori, has been accepted for presentation as a full paper in the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData'24). Link.
October 15, 2024: Our paper "Examining the Representation of Youth in the US Policy Documents through the Lens of Research", co-authored by Abdul Rahman Shaikh, and Dr. Hamed Alhoori, has been accepted for presentation as a short paper in the _Industry Track_ in 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData'24). Link.
September 25, 2024: Our paper "Building an Explainable Policy Citation Prediction Model on Textual Features of the Research Articles", co-authored by my supervisor Dr. Hamed Alhoori, has been accepted for presentation in the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL'24).Link.
April 26, 2024: Another work, "Are Research Articles Cited in Relevant Policy Documents? A Quantitative Analysis," was accepted as a contributed talk at the International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation (ICSSI'24). Washington, DC, is calling!
April 18, 2024: Our work, "Examining the Representation of Youth in the US Policy Documents through the Lens of Research," was accepted as a contributed talk at the 10th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2'24). Excited to be in Philly!

📧 Email: mokarrama.datalab@gmail.com
🔗 LinkedIn: Miftahul Jannat Mokarrama