Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION

• Doctor of Philosophy – Computer Science Department
  Jan 2019- June 2024
  Georgia State University, GPA: 3.79/4.0, Atlanta, GA
  INSPIRE Center
  Dissertation: “Design and Implementation of Robust Deep Neural Networks Against NLP Adversarial Attacks”
• Master of Science - School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
  2011-2014
  University of Tehran, Medical Image Processing Laboratory, Tehran, Iran
  Thesis: “Implementation of 3D Visualization for Medical Image Display”

TECHNICAL SKILLS

PROFICIENT (Rate: 7-9 out of 10)

• Python 3+
• PyTorch | Keras
• NumPy
• | ML | AI | NLP | R&D
• C/C++
• Scikit-Learn (Sklearn) |
• Generative AI
• Self-Supervised Learning | Semantic Representation
• OOP
• NLTK | spaCy
• Unsupervised Learning
• Large/Pre-Trained Language Models (LLMs & PLMs)
• SQL
• NumPy | Pandas
• Adversarial Training
• Self-Attention | Transformers | Semantic Representation
• Communication
• Operations Research
• Lucene | Lemur Toolkit
• Algorithm | Data Structure | AI Security

INTERMEDIATE (Rate: 5-7 out of 10)

• Git | GitHub
• TensorFlow
• CNNs | GANs
• Data Mining | LSA | PLSA | LDA
• Compilers
• Shell | Linux
• CPU | GPU
• HTML | CSS | JavaScript | Node.js
• Ubuntu |
• Gephi |
• Distributed Training
• Image Segmentation | 3D Visualization
• Colab
• Matplotlib
• Java | C# | MVC ASP.net
• DBMS | SQL SERVER| SQLite

BEGINNER (Rate: 1-5 out of 10)

• Flask
• OpenCV
• Speech Recognition
• Reinforcement Learning
• MATLAB
• Scala | Spark
• Prompt Engineering
• ML Optimization | Computer Vision (CV)

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

• Trustworthy AI Graduate Researcher (Full-Time), Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA
  Jan 2020 – Present
  Developed a universal text representations framework to enhance resilience against adversarial attacks and adversarial NLP tasks. Extended a robust framework for sentence embeddings using self-supervised contrastive pre-training. Designed and implemented a semantic, syntactic, and context-aware generator for natural language adversarial examples.
• Information Retrieval Research Assistant (Full-Time), University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  July 2014 – Sep 2016
  Devised a monolingual (Farsi) and bilingual (English to Farsi) plagiarism detection framework for scientific papers and theses. Crafted a source retrieval module for scientific plagiarism detection, implementing an effective keyword extraction method. Achieved third place in the international competition of plagiarism detection: source retrieval, PAN 2015.
• Machine Vision Graduate Researcher (Full-Time), University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  Sep 2011 – Jun 2014
  Designed and implemented a three-dimensional visualization toolkit using 2D CT medical images.

TOP PUBLICATIONS

• JOURNAL
  Javad Rafiei Asl, Mohammad H. Rafiei, Manar Alohaly, and Daniel Takabi. "A Semantic, Syntactic, And Context-Aware Natural Language Adversarial Example Generator." IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2024), doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2024.3359817.
• Javad Rafiei-Asl, and Ahmad Nickabadi. "TSAKE: A topical and structural automatic keyphrase extractor." Applied soft computing 58 (2017), doi: 10.1016/j.asoc.2017.05.014.
• CONFERENCE
  Javad Rafiei Asl, Prajwal Panzade, Eduardo Blanco, Daniel Takabi, Zhipeng Cai. "RobustSentEmbed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Adversarial Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning." Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2024.
• Javad Rafiei Asl, Eduardo Blanco, and Daniel Takabi. "RobustEmbed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training." In The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.
• Javad Rafiei Asl, Salar Mohtaj, Vahid Zarrabi, and Habibollah Asghari. "Source retrieval plagiarism detection based on noun phrase and keyword phrase extraction—Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2015." In Proceedings of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum and Workshop (CLEF’15). 2015.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

• Georgia State University
  Lab Teacher Assistant for Data Structure Course, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021
  Lab Teacher Assistant for System-level programming Course, Spring 2020, Spring 2021
  Teacher Assistant for Web Programming Course, Summer 2019
• University of Applied Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran
  Lecturer, Text Mining and Analytics, Fall 2016
  Lecturer, Client-Side Programming, Spring 2016
• University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran
  Teacher Assistant, Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages & Computation, Spring 2009