SoLID Lab

The Social Language and Intelligent Dialogue Agents Lab SoLID at UNCC conducts research in two broad areas. The first is on the social aspects of language -- what is being communicated between people when they use language (beyond just the words that are used!). Very interesting properties about human behavior can be gleaned from the language that people use. And the second area is the modeling and development of intelligent conversational agents. Our goal is to try and replicate human behaviors in these intelligent conversational agents.

Research Sponsors

We are grateful for the support from NSF, DARPA, ONR, ARO and AFRL, NVIDIA, IARPA and Lockheed Martin for our work at SoLID.

Current Students

Sashank Santhanam

Doctoral Candidate
2017-Present
Sashank

Sashank's interests are broadly in natural language processing and deep learning. Sashank has a Masters in Computer Science from UNC-Charlotte. He worked as business analyst for Walmart Corp prior to joining UNCC for his doctoral studies.

Khyati Mahajan

Doctoral Student
2018-Present
Khyati

Khyati joined the CS department and Dr. Shaikh's team in Fall 2018. She is interested in computational sociolinguistics and NLP. She completed her undergraduate studies in 2017 before joining UNCC as a graduate student.

Zhuo Cheng

Doctoral Student
2018-Present
Zhuo

Zhuo joined the PhD program in Fall 2018. He is interested in natural language processing, social network analysis and computational social science. He got his bachelor degree from Sichuan University and master degree from UNCC.

Erfan Al-Hossami

Doctoral Student
2020-Present
Erfan

Erfan is interested in Natural Language Processing and Generation and its applications. Currently, Erfan is working on Code Generation from Natural Language. Erfan seeks to accelerate the human learning of programming using Language Generation.

Lolo Aboufoul

Undergraduate Student
2020-Present
Lolo

Lolo is an Undergraduate Computer Science student with a biology minor. She is interested in social network analysis as well as any overlap between biology and computer science, such as AI in healthcare. Lolo joined Dr. Shaikh's team in September 2020

Prospective Students

I am always looking for motivated students to work with. If you are interested, please contact me via email. Research Assistantships are available to exceptional Ph.D. and Masters students. NOTE: Sometimes, it takes me a while to respond to email regarding assistantships. Your chances for funded research with me will dramatically improve if you take one of my classes and do well in the course.

Past Students

Vidhushini Srinivasan - MS in CS December 2018 - Software Engineer(Audience Platform) at Quantcast. She successfully defended her thesis advised by Dr.Shaikh titled "Emotional Natural Language Generation".

Prasanna Lalingkar - MS in CS December 2017 - currently at Microsoft Research

Naveen Dennis Barnabas - MS in CS December 2017, now at Duke Energy

Erik Butler - MS in CS: Thesis Topic: Immersive Visualization through Virtual and Augmented Reality, Co-advised with Dr. Aidong Lu

Ranjith Ravikumar - MS in CS: Thesis Topic: STUDY OF SOCIAL FACTORS IN ACTIVITY-BASED ACTIVE LEARNING CLASSROOM, Co-advised with Dr. Mohsen Dorodchi

Abhishek Bhandwaldar - MS in CS: Thesis Topic: BIOMEDICAL QUESTION ANSWERING, Co-advised with Dr. Wlodek Zadrozny

Chetan Borse - MS in CS: Thesis Topic: INTERACTIVE DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL, Co-advised with Dr. Wlodek Zadrozny

Noushin Radnia - MS in Architecture/Design: Thesis Topic: Emotion and Art, Co-advised with Dr. Erik Sauda

Yasaman Kamyab Hessary (PhD Spring 2018) - Proposed Topic: ARTIFICIAL FINANCIAL MARKETS: AN AGENT BASED APPROACH TO STUDY HERDS, BUBBLES, AND CRASHES, Co-advised with Dr. Mirsad Hadzikadic, Post-doc at Northwestern University

Farah Tokmic (PhD Spring 2018) - Proposed Topic: Measuring Stigma towards Behavioral Health Disorders, Co-advised with Dr. Mirsad Hadzikadic, Post-doc at UNC Charlotte