Forough Arabshahi

I am a senior Research Scientist at Meta (Facebook). Prior to that I was a Postdoctoral Associate supervised by Tom Mitchell in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. I recieved my Ph.D. from the University of California Irvine under the supervision of Anima Anandkumar and Sameer Singh.

Experience and Positions

  • Present 2020

    Senior Research Scientist

    Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, CA

  • 2020 2018

    Post-doctoral Associate

    Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, Department of Machine Learning

  • Summer 2017

    Software Engineer Intern

    Pepperdata, Inc., Cupertino, CA

  • Summer 2016

    Research Intern

    Yahoo Labs, Sunnyvale, CA

Education

  • Ph.D. 2018

    University of California Irvine

    Dissertation: Learning Latent Hierarchical Structures via Probabilistic Models and Deep Learning

  • M.Sc. 2012

    Amirkabir University of Technology

    Thesis: UWB imaging of the breast tissue for early stage breast cancer detection

  • B.Sc. 2010

    Shiraz University

    Project: A MAC Layer Protocol for Underwater Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks

Teaching Experience

  • Spring 2018

    Invited Lecture: "Spectral Methods: Latent Variable Models"

    Probabilistic Graphical Models Course (10-708) Department of Machine Learning, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Slides, Annotated Slides, Video.

Honors and Awards

  • Fall 19
    Rising Stars 2019
    Selected to participate in Rising Stars 2019, an academic career workshop for women in EECS hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Spring 18
    ICLR travel award
    Recipient of $500 for attending the International Conference on Learning Representations, Vancouver, CA
  • Spring 17
    Phi Betta Kappa Alumni International Scholarship
    Recipient of $2000 for continuing my graduate studies at University of California Irvine.
  • Fall 15
    GHC Scholarship
    Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing scholar, 2015.
  • Fall 15
    ICDM student award
    Recipient of $550 for attending the IEEE International Conference on data mining.
  • Summer 15
    UCI data science initiative summer fellowship
    Recipient of $6,039, supporting my research on predictive modeling in massive open online courses. Acceptance rate: 15/115.
  • Fall 14
    Bren School of ICS grace hopper grant
  • Summer 14
    Machine Learning summer school scholarship grant
    Recipient of the MLSS student grant, Carnegie Mellon University.
  • Fall 10
    Exceptional talent student award
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    Exempted from the Nationwide Graduate Entrance Examinations for graduate studies at Shiraz University.