Dr Farhana Ferdousi Liza has joined as a Lecturer in Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in September 2021. Her primary research interests and expertise lie in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science. She has published articles including in the AAAI, EMNLP, and PLOS ONE. Before joining the UEA, she worked as a researcher at ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre at the University of Essex where she worked with external stakeholders to add or improve a data science stack in their decision-making process and developed Continuing Professional Development (CPD) modules in Data Science for ESNEFT (one of the NHS Trusts). She also provided training to the UK public sector professionals including NHS and Police. Her PhD study was funded by the University of Kent's JILP Endowment Scholarship, and later she was awarded the Sciences Postgraduate Research Prize for excellent progress which was featured in the University of Kent’s blog post. She was selected for an internship at The Alan Turing Institute and later her collaborative research (with Turing fellows) on semantic profiling was featured in its blog post. She has five years of higher education teaching experience in the undergraduate and postgraduate programs in the UK, USA, and Bangladesh.  

Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human-AI Interaction, Systemic AI Safety and Security, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Data Science. AI research includes analysis of deep learning models (e.g., large language models), identifying fragility and improving the robustness from adversarial attacks, and designing AI model evaluation techniques. NLP problems include representation learning, information extraction, text summarization, question answering.

For data science applications, she is interested in solving problems arising in education, healthcare (specifically mental healthcare), the public sector, and social media (e.g., fake news and fact checking). Her works include the incorporation of deep learning and natural language processing in computational social and legal science.

AI Teaching Project - She is the UEA Computing Sciences lead contact for the national working group on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) project, a part of the Research Libraries UK sub group who are looking at discipline specific guidance on Generative AI. The group work is around collaborating to avoid duplication of effort and develop more informed policy and practice by working together.

Module Leader - She leads large modules including Information Retrieval and Database Systems. 

CMP DLO - She has been the Disability Liaison Officer for Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia since 2022. Her vision for inclusive pedagogy is to create an inclusive classroom environment where everyone is welcome to contribute, feels valued, and where the content is relevant to learners’ diverse identities and interests.