Sarah Masud

Hello there, I am a computational social science researcher, applying technology to study technology’s impact on society. My work builds upon network science, natural language processing, and social science to study digital spaces.

What am I currently up to?

I am currently a Postdoc with Prof. Isabelle Augestein at CopeNLU, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. In my postdoc, I am investigating the use of computational techniques to study narrative styles and their role in misinformation. I am hosted at the picturesque Pioneer Center of AI.

Since 2020, I have been volunteering as a reviewer for the Journal of Open Source Software. I classify myself as an avid reader, a seasonal poet 😉 and a reluctant speaker. A not-so-updated list of my talks, open mics, and presentation material is available here.

What was my Phd thesis on?

Supervised by Dr. Tanmoy Chakraborty and Prof. Vikram Goyal, I worked on applying computational techniques to analyse hate speech on the Web. I was hosted at Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2) at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi. In 2024, I was selected as one of the Young Researchers for the 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum.

During my Phd, I was fortunate to receive financial support from Google Phd Fellowship (2023-2024), the Prime Minister Doctoral Research Fellowship - PMRF (2020-2023), and WiproAI (2020-2023).

For summer 2023 (May-July), I was a visiting researcher at the School of Social Science and Technology, Technical University of Munich, hosted by Prof. Jürgen Pfeffer. My visit there was supported by the Overseas Research Fellowship at IIIT-Delhi.

What was I up to in my previous life?

Prior to joining academia, I worked as a data scientist in developer tooling at Red Hat, Bangalore, for 2.5 years. The work revolved around providing developer analytics to the OpenShift.io platform. Our work contributed to a plugin on VSCode and got featured in TechCrunch. Even before that, in 2016, I obtained a Bachelor’s in Technology in Computer Science & Engineering from Jamia Millia Islamia.

From 2015 to 2024, I was a volunteer and mentor with AnitB.org. I also served as a member of their AI Committee.