I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at LUMS and the founding director of the Center for Speech and Language Technologies (CSaLT). I am a Fulbright Scholar and received my Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. 

My research interests include Speech & Natural Language Processing, Speech-based Human Computer Interfaces, and Information & Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). The aim of my research is to enable information access and social connectivity for under-connected and under-served populations (low-literate, low-income, tech naïve, visually impaired, linguistically/socially marginalized, and geographically remote communities, and oral cultures) throughout the developing world. My work focusses on the development of speech-based information services and social networks accessible over simple and feature phones to be used as vehicles for large-scale dissemination of development-related information, pulling information in the form of real-time surveys and for performing randomized controlled trials and demographic studies. These services also provide target marginalized populations with a voice and a digital social identity. My work in Speech and Language technologies is focused on the localization of linguistic resources and techniques to Pakistani context for the development of Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech, Voice-biometrics, Spoken Term Detection and relevant capabilities. I teach Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing and Machine Learning at graduate and undergraduate levels.

My research has been funded by prestigious organizations like Google Inc., Facebook Research, UNICEF, GIZ, National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI), and the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. I am an Associate Chair in the program committee for CHI. I have also been the program committee chair for short papers for ICTD 2017 and a program committee member for ICTD, and ACM COMPASS (formerly ACM DEV) since 2015.

Website: http://aghaaliraza.com