Effat Farhana

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Computer Sciences at Vanderbilt University. I completed my Ph.D. under Dr. Collin F. Lynch at North Carolina State University and my B.S. from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

My research focuses on mining educational software (e.g., MOOCs, online learning platforms) to derive data-driven heuristics and designing interpretable machine learning algorithms. Towards interpretable machine learning, my research has focused on designing a cognitive theory-grounded system for personalized learning in education (EAAI 2022). Another work focused on designing a rule-mining classification algorithm--to find the right balance between interpretability and performance (GECCO 2017, GECCO 2018). Towards data-driven analytics, I focus on discovering insight by exploiting data from educational software, such as understanding students' interactions within the system and connecting those with their academic performance (ACM L@S 2020, EDM 2020).

I am also broadly interested in empirical software engineering research (ICSE 2020, EMSE 2020, ICSME 2019).

Awards and Honors

  • Rising Star in Data Science-Jan 2021, University of Chicago, 2021
  • Travel award for Women in Machine Learning (WiML) at NeurIPS, 2020 (virtual).
  • Travel award for CRA-WP Early and Mid Career Mentoring Workshop, 2020.
  • Tapia Diversity in Computing Conference, 2020 scholarship for ACM Student Research Competition (Poster).
  • Women in Computer Science (WiCS), NCSU scholarship for Grace Hopper Conference, 2018.

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