Zairah Mustahsan

Zairah Mustahsan

Hey! I am a Data Scientist at IBM. I work on Information Retrieval and NLP models for intent classification, question answering, and document retrieval. I am passionate about ethics and privacy in data and frequently contribute to IBM’s AI Fairness research and tools.

Previously, I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Master’s in Computer Science. I was advised by Jason Moore at The Computational Genetics Lab where I worked on benchmarking the scikit-learn machine learning library in Python.

Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Scholar.

Patents and Publications

  • Enhancing fairness in transfer learning for machine learning models with missing protected attributes in source or target domains, May 27, 2021.
    Link
  • Fair Transfer Learning with Missing Protected Attributes. A. Coston, K. N. Ramamurthy, D. Wei, K. R. Varshney, S. Speakman, Z. Mustahsan, and S. Chakraborty; AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society - AIES 2019.
    Link
  • Data-driven Advice for Applying Machine Learning to Bioinformatics Problems. R. S. Olson, W. L. Cava, Z. Mustahsan, A. Varik, J. H. Moore; Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, 2018.
    Link

Little more about me

I was born and raised in Kashmir. It’s a ~70K sq mile land in the Northern Himalayas bordering South and Central Asia. Kashmir has a very long history of colonialism. Often it’s labeled as “too complicated” for a peaceful resolution. But the tragic reality is as simple as it can get for those who understand.

I left Kashmir many years back to pursue higher education. I miss it every day.

I love to travel and sit in cafes. I often venture into adventure sports. I believe travel opens unimaginable new doors and expands one’s horizons by exposure to diverse cultures, landscapes, and people that are so inspiring.

I enjoy reading history, literature, and philosophy.

I mostly rely on independent resources and people’s lived experiences for history. The ones that challenge the status quo and help break the institutional narratives that we’re conditioned to believe.

I often contemplate the nature and meaning of time. Is time an illusion? How is memory related to time? Why do some days feel like years and some years feel like seconds? To this end, I’ve read The Philosophy of Time and The Experience and Perception of Time word to word several times. I don’t know yet where I’m going with all this. I guess “time” will tell.

I sometimes collect what I read here.

Having multiple hobbies and interests can feel overwhelming 🙂

Ironically, the wide variety of things that I’ve read and my experiences, stitched with my inner monologue, have given me a sense of unification — opening me to the world of Sacred Geometry. I find harmony in observing the language of shapes and patterns hidden in the world around us. I think it reflects the underlying order of the universe — embodying Oneness with all of life.