Aatif Nisar Dar

I am a second year PhD student at Virginia Tech, working with Prof. Shaddi Hasan. My research lies at the intersection of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), Internet Measurement, Remote Sensing, and AI/ML.

My current research is in Internet measurement across the USA. I am working on DiDo, a causal inference-based framework to audit upgrade claims made in the National Broadband Map (NBM). I am also building the Broadband Surveyor Tool (BBS) to systematically measure service availability and affordability.

I use my remote sensing and AI/ML skills to answer similar research questions. I have worked on building spatio-temporal representations of ISP footprints using remote sensing data, network measurements, and deployment data. I am also involved in more projects involving remote sensing and AI/ML, and will post about them here soon.

More broadly, I am interested in 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 at IIT Delhi, where I worked on 1. Methodology to Assess Equity in Access to Water in Villages in India 2. Predicting ponds, wells, and plantation trees using high-resolution Google Maps imagery, and 3. Using Satellite Images to Track Relative Socioeconomic Development in Rural India.

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.