About Me
I’m a PhD student in Computer Engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University, co-supervised by Dr. Ebrahim Bagheri and Dr. Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed. My research interests sit at the intersection of responsible AI, social computing, and migration studies. Using techniques from natural language processing and information retrieval, I take a critical lens to observe how immigration is framed across various media and popular culture, and how data driven systems embed within them biased frames that end up marginalizing migrants.
Current Projects
A longitudinal analysis of Reddit posts by immigrants to Canada, reconstructing pre- and post-arrival timelines to study mental health trajectories, integration challenges, and everyday concerns.
Studying how immigration-related queries and passages are framed in large-scale IR benchmarks (e.g., MS MARCO) to uncover biases in how migrants and immigration are represented.
Building an AI-assisted, human-in-the-loop data pipeline to collect, structure, and analyze immigration-related texts from parliamentary debates, news, and online platforms.
A critical overview of how AI and digital technologies are reshaping immigration systems, from risk assessment and border control to application processing and integration support.
Recent Publications
Zarif Masud, Abhijit Paul, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Ebrahim Bagheri. (2026). European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026), IR-for-Good Track
Zarif Masud, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Ebrahim Bagheri. (2026). In Ana Beduschi (Ed.), Handbook on Migration and Artificial Intelligence, Edward Elgar Publishing
Sharif Mohammad Abdullah, Abhijit Paul, Zarif Masud, Shebuti Rayana, Abu Nayeem Md Touhidul Alam, Faisal Muhammad Shah, Md Shadab Iftikhar, Md Arid Hasan, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun. (2025). arXiv