Introduction

I am a Professor and the Chairperson of Computer Science and Engineering at BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I am also the founding Director of the Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing (CRBLP), which in the last eight years has grown to be one of the most productive Bangla (exonym: Bengali) language processing research groups in the world. More recently, I established the Clouds Lab at BRAC University — the first in Bangladesh — and exciting things are beginning to happen there as well. On the corporate front, I work with Amadeyr Cloud Ltd. (ACL), advising ACL on their cloud computing infrastructure and Android-based application development. Prior to joining BRACU in 2003, I spent twelve years working on the computational models for x-ray and EUV lithographies and x-ray optical systems with the Center for Nanotechnology of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Along the way, I have consulted for IBM, Motorola, ASET (Japan), ESRF (France), and various other organizations that are still using some of the models and software that I had contributed to. I have been involved in the open source community for over two decades, having contributed to many open source projects (GNU Compiler Collection or GCC, Cygwin, MinGW, to name just a few); I try to release all my research outputs under some open source/content license.

Beyond academia, I am actively involved with the public sector, the development sector, and the industry. I continue to wear many hats — teacher, researcher, hacker, software developer, manager, technology consultant and evangelist.

I  graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Ph.D. (2003), Masters (1991) and Bachelors (1988) degrees, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering.