Aatif Nisar Dar

I am a first year PhD student at Virginia Tech, working with Prof. Shaddi Hasan. My research interests are in Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), AI/ML, and Remote Sensing.

I am building appropriateAppropriate means that technologies should be designed keeping the social context in mind — what material is available locally, how tools can be repaired, who will use them, and how. technologies to address socioeconomic inequalities and the digital divide. These research interests are shaped by my past research experiences. I worked as a project scientist with Prof. Aaditeshwar Seth in the ICTD lab of IIT Delhi where I have worked on 1. Predicting ponds, wells, and plantation trees using high-resolution Google Maps imagery 2. Assessing equity in access to water, and 3. Socioeconomic prediction using satellite data.

Before that I was a project scientist in the Vision Lab of IIT Delhi with Prof. Nandana Sengupta and Prof. Chetan Arora working on Assessing the Feasibility and Ethics of Economic Status Prediction using Deep Learning on Household Images. I also worked as a research assistant at Ashoka University with Prof. Anirban Sen on PolicyStory: Leveraging Large Language Models to Generate Comprehensible Summaries of Policy-News in India. I completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Delhi University and my master’s degree in Computer Science from South Asian University. During my master’s, I worked with Prof. Reshma Rastogi on MLGAN: Addressing Imbalance in Multilabel Learning Using Generative Adversarial Networks.