Ashish Sharma

Last updated in . Get the latest version at ash-shar.github.io/cv.

Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington

ash-shar.github.io
google scholar
ashshar@cs.washington.edu

Education

2019–2024 University of Washington Seattle, WA, USA

PhD Student in Computer Science

2013–2018 Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, WB, India

Master of Technology in Computer Science
Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science
Student-Par Excellence Award

Research Experience

2024–Present Microsoft Redmond, WA, USA
Senior Applied Scientist

2019–2024 University of Washington Seattle, WA, USA
Research Assistant

Mentor: Tim Althoff

2018–2019 Microsoft Research Bengaluru, KA, India
Research Fellow

Mentor: Monojit Choudhury

Summer 2017 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL, USA
Research Intern

Mentor: Hari Sundaram

Summer 2016 Adobe Systems Bengaluru, KA, India
Research Intern

Mentor: Sunav Choudhary

2016–2018 Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, WB, India
Research Assistant

Mentor: Niloy Ganguly

Awards

2023 ACL 2023 Outstanding Paper Award

For "Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interaction"

2023 JP Morgan Chase AI Research PhD Fellowship

2021 WWW Best Paper Award

For "Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approach" (Top-1 paper out of 1700+ submissions)

2019 Student Par-Excellence Award

Awarded by Department of Computer Science, IIT Kharagpur

2019 SIGIR Student Travel Grant

For attending CIKM 2019

2017 COMSNETS Best Academic Demo Award

For "CommBox: Utilizing Sensors for Real-Time Cricket Shot Identification & Commentary Generation"

2017 S.N. Bose Scholarship

One of the 50 scholars from India

2017 Student Travel Grant

For attending COMSNETS 2017

2016 Goralal Syngal Memorial Scholarship

For academic excellence during 2015-2016

Publications

Conference

Journal

Preprint

Demo

Workshop

Invited Talks

Human-AI Collaboration to Support Mental Health and Well-Being

Buffalo Psychiatric Center
Harvard Business School
Jimini Health

Human-AI Collaboration to Support Real-World Tasks

Microsoft

Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interaction

Mental Health America Conference

Human-AI Collaboration Enables Empathic Conversations in Mental Health Support

Headspace Conversational AI Journal Club
Issaquah High School Artificial Intelligence Club

Leveraging Cloud Compute for Improving Empathy in Mental Health Support

Research Running on Cloud Compute and Emerging Technologies

Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support

IJCAI 2022, Best Papers from Sister Conferences
Crime Lab, University of Chicago

NLP for Mental Health

University of Connecticut

Media Coverage

Student Mentoring

2023–Present

Kelly Chiu

UW

MS student at UW

2021–2022

Ethan Hsu

UW

MS student at Penn State University; now a Ph.D. student at UT Austin

2020–2021

Inna Lin

UW

MS student at Cornell University; now a PhD student at UW

Teaching

2021 CSE 547: Machine Learning for Big Data University of Washington

Head Teaching Assistant (with Tim Althoff)

2020 CSE 547: Machine Learning for Big Data University of Washington

Head Teaching Assistant (with Tim Althoff)

2018 CS29003: Algorithms Laboratory Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Teaching Assistant (with Abhijit Das)

2017 CS31003: Compilers Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Teaching Assistant (with Animesh Mukherjee)

Service

Organizer
Human-Centered Large Language Modeling Workshop at ACL 2024
PC/Reviewer
ACL 2024, CHI 2024, ACL 2023, ICWSM 2023, CHI 2023, ACL 2022, ARR 2022, EMNLP 2022, NAACL 2022, WWW 2022, ICWSM 2022, CHI 2022, KDD 2022, W-NUT 2022, ACL 2021, EMNLP 2021, WWW 2021, ICWSM 2021, MAISoN 2021, W-NUT 2021, ACL 2020, EMNLP 2020, TCSS 2020, NAACL 2019, PAKDD 2019
Volunteer
PLO 2019, COMSNETS 2017

Relevant Coursework

AI
Speech and Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Interactive Learning

Data Mining
Information Retrieval, Scalable Data Mining, Social Computing, Economic and Financial Network Analysis

Systems
Distributed Systems, Database Management Systems, Cloud Computing

Misc.
Computational Ethics in NLP, Big and Small Data for Health, Smartphone Computing and Applications, Image Processing, Probability and Statistics, Operations Research