Naeemul Hassan, assistant professor of computer and information science, poses in front of a favorite painting during a visit to the art gallery. Submitted photo
The moment Naeemul Hassan met faculty in the University of Mississippi School of Engineering, the newest assistant professor of computer and information science felt that it was his destiny to be here.
“When I came at Ole Miss for the job interview, the two things which impressed me the most were the people in the department and the university campus,” he said. “I almost immediately decided that if I was offered the position, this is the place where I wanted to join.”
Hassan said that UM’s classification as an R-1 university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and the work being done at the UM Medical Center sealed the deal for him.
“Recently, I have developed an interest in applying data mining and deep learning techniques to medical and health-related data,” he said. “For these above reasons, I decided to join Ole Miss.
“My two months of stay in this university hasn’t proven me wrong. Besides, this small city of Oxford has many interesting things to offer.”
Though Hassan has been on campus only a few months, he already has set both short- and long-term goals.
“My short-term goal is establishing a Data Exploration and Research Laboratory, or dear.lab,” Hassan said. “The objective of this lab would be to promote interdisciplinary data intensive research.
“I also am preparing to teach Computational Journalism, which is first such course to be offered in the state of Mississippi, in spring 2017.”
Hassan is a welcome addition to the department, said Dawn Wilkins, chair and professor of computer and information science.
“Dr. Hassan’s knowledge of computational journalism will greatly enhance our curriculum,” she said. “His teaching style is engaging and informative.”
The new course is designed to teach application of big data and data science in textual domains, particularly in journalism and reporting, Hassan said. The topics include data journalism, natural language processing, visualization, automated fact-checking and story finding, social media sensing, and web data analysis. This course will also explore journalism and reporting-focused open source tools.
“In a nutshell, this is an ideal course for computer science students who are fascinated with natural language and for journalism students who are enthusiastic about data,” Hassan said.
Hassan said his long-term goals include engaging with external funding resources, extending cross-domain inter- and intra-university research and creating a footprint for Ole Miss in the computational journalism research domain.
“Besides the above, my interests are in the general fields of big data, database and data mining,” he said. “I am blessed to work in these exciting, vibrant and application-driven areas. With the advance of our society and information technology, new data – in new models, from new application domains, at unprecedented volume and complexity – will keep taking prevalence, and new data-related needs will take form. Therefore, I will always have fascinating and challenging research problems to solve.”
During his doctoral program, Hassan collaborated with the journalism departments of the University of Texas at Arlington, Duke University and Stanford University. He has a strong interest in continuing interdisciplinary research and working with the Meek School of Journalism and New Media.
“Much of journalism today is about big data,” said Will Norton, UM journalism dean. “Dr. Naeemul Hassan is focused on research to use computers for checking facts and on how to find leads for stories by monitoring data.
“If the Meek School is to become a new media entity at the highest level, it is crucial to have persons of Dr. Hassan’s expertise teaching our students how to use big data efficiently. We are grateful he is at Ole Miss and willing to work with our students.”
A native of Bangladesh, Hassan received his bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2009. He came to U.S. and joined the Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Arlington. Under the supervision of Chengkai Li in the research area of database systems, data mining and computational journalism, Hassan completed the program in August 2016.
“My most fulfilling personal achievement was receiving the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award at the University of Texas at Arlington,” he said. “Others I am proud of are the VLDB 2014 Excellent Demonstration Award and the ACES 2016 Graduate Poster Presidents Award.”
Hassan and his wife, Nusrat Armin, live in Oxford. She earned her bachelor’s in architecture from BUET and is considering a master’s degree. His parents and older sister still reside in Bangladesh.
In his spare time, Hassan enjoys traveling, playing badminton and spending time with the family.