Shahzad Khan, PhD

Current

President at Whyz Technologies Inc.

Past

Consultant at Canadian Standards Association (CSA), Ottawa, Canada
Senior Research Scientist at DISTIL Interactive Ltd
Consultant at Frontiers Research Foundation (Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne Spin-off)

PhD Researcher at University of Cambridge
Director Engineering at MOJIS Social Networking Ltd
Assistant Professor at National University of Sciences and Technology
Applications Development Manager at Telmax Corp
Consultant at United Technologies
Consultant at SoftWeb Corporation
eBusiness Project Manager at Community and Information Technology Institute
Research Programmer at MNIS-Textwise

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8 more...

Education

University of Cambridge
Syracuse University
Lahore University of Management Sciences

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Recommended

1 person has recommended Shahzad

Connections

337 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

Shahzad Khan, PhD’s Summary

I have 12 years of info-tech industry experience across the entire software development life-cycle. I am an experienced Artificial Intelligence researcher and product manager with polished client-facing skills, who can lead an engineering team to deliver projects within the triple constraints (cost, time, and scope).

My PhD from Cambridge University (UK) is in computational linguistics. I have a decade of experience in information retrieval (search technologies), machine learning, data mining, and analytics.

I am open to consulting opportunities.

Shahzad Khan, PhD’s Specialties:

Intelligent systems development, with special interests in computational linguistics (search technologies, machine translation, summarization)

Experienced with machine learning, in-simulation competency assessment, natural language generation, decision support system, analytics, event identification and data visualization.

Shahzad Khan, PhD’s Experience

President

Whyz Technologies Inc.

(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

May 2009 — Present (8 months)

Leading the research, development and commercialization of software that mitigates the information overload that knowledge workers content with when working with modern email streams. This product is based on innovative content analysis, linguistics affect identification and machine learning techniques.
Consultant

Canadian Standards Association (CSA), Ottawa, Canada

(Non-Profit; Information Services industry)

June 2009 — September 2009 (4 months)

Created a natural language generation (NLG) toolkit to support a non-linear, high-state count, model-driven interactive learning simulation (serious game). This simulation was designed to train middle-managers on interpersonal behavior, management best-practices and cultural sensitivity.

The content author generated almost 20,000 feedback messages (which supported learning) within two days by using this NLG tool.

Designed a user assessment generation module using Hofstede’s cultural analysis (http://bit.ly/4o2j6t). The assessment provided insightful reports via statistical event analysis of in-game choices.
Senior Research Scientist

DISTIL Interactive Ltd

(Computer Games industry)

October 2007 — June 2009 (1 year 9 months)

I have designed and implemented an automatic content generation solution in Perl that reduced the game development cycle time by 2 months.

Additionally, I researched and implemented automatic assessment techniques (via machine learning) to identify game-play strategies. These were used to generate pedagogically relevant reports that help the player to improve their skill level. The system was implemented in Perl, Java, XML, DHTML and the GD libraries on Linux. This technology earned DISTIL the ‘best product’ award at the DevLearn ’08 eLearning conference.

Based on the success of these techniques, I successfully applied for over $500K+ in grants from Ontario Centres of Excellence, Precarn Inc and NSERC strategic fund to implement a natural language generation toolkit for serious games. I am currently working with partners at the Univ of Ottawa to enhance the generated content to simulate personality and emotions in digital persona in serious games.
Consultant

Frontiers Research Foundation (Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne Spin-off)

(Non-Profit; Publishing industry)

2006 — 2007 (1 year )

I reengineered the document acquisition process of leading neuroscience research portal, to eliminate customers data entry effort via UNIX C++ solution that retrieved structured XML from scientific document sourced as PDF.

I managed the development of the ‘Citation Data-Warehouse’ (CDW) for this portal. This employed web crawlers and AI heuristics to harvest authors, publications and citations from the web

I designed an Analytics System which captured user-clicks and employed data warehousing techniques to identify user events. The data was used to visualize custom web and business metrics to ascertain customer satisfaction levels.

While physically present in Canada, I managed the Analytics and CDW implementation for the Swiss client via engineers in Asia. I employed agile methods to overcome significant challenges related to communication, project tracking and time-zone differences to complete the project. This resulted in a successful implementation at a 75% saving in cost.
PhD Researcher

University of Cambridge

(Educational Institution; Research industry)

2004 — 2007 (3 years )

During my research at Cambridge I investigated sentiment classification (subjectivity analysis). I managed to improve classification accuracy via a novel syntactic analyses of sentences that generated new new features for the statistical machine learning classification systems.

I implemented the complete system using a mix of Java, C++ and UNIX shell scripts. The final system was refactored to run on a CONDOR supercomputing cluster by parallelizing the implemented code.

I was also the teaching assistant for the following courses:
Human-Computer Interaction, Natural Language Processing, Advanced System Topics (Distributed Networks and P2P Systems), Information Retrieval, Computing and the Web (J2EE, XML)
Director Engineering

MOJIS Social Networking Ltd

(Online Media industry)

2005 — 2006 (1 year )

I developed a complex, multi-module, content management and social networking web portal. The Debian-based solution was built using the OpenACS package running on the AOLserver web server. The scripts were written in TCL and PL/PGSQL stored procedures and supported persistence via the Postgres RDBMS.
Assistant Professor

National University of Sciences and Technology

(Higher Education industry)

2001 — 2004 (3 years )

I contributed actively to the teaching, course development, research and administrative functions of NUST, which is ranked as the #20 university in Asia (ASIAWEEK 2000)

My research focused on NLP-intensive applications such as information retrieval (search engines), knowledge management, machine translation, word-sense disambiguation, text summarization and the semantic web

I taught the following courses during my tenure at NUST:
Web Technologies I [HTML, Javascript, Perl, PostgreSQL, DHTML, UML], Web Tech II [C#, XML, Web Services, ASP.NET, Crystal Reports], eCommerce, Project Management and Entrepreneurship
Applications Development Manager

Telmax Corp

(Computer Software industry)

2000 — 2001 (1 year )

I designed and implemented the Element Management System (EMS) to automatically configure Telmax’s DSL devices. This effort replaced the existing prototype command line interface with a complete wizard-based point and click solution and removed the need for external drivers, PC based configuration and a serial cable bridges (for configuration). This solution reduced costs, increased robustness of the offering and simplified the product. The solution was designed to be deployed as a DHTML powered web application that interfaced with custom firmware running on Virata RTOS.
Consultant

United Technologies

(Public Company; UTX; Aviation & Aerospace industry)

2000 — 2000 (less than a year)

I Integrated an analytics system to track web traffic on the Carrier/UTC’s corporate Intranet and Internet servers. This system highlighted strong and weak areas of Carrier’s web presence, located errors (such as broken links) and suggested high-traffic areas for further development and increased resource allocation. The solution was implemented via WebTrends with an Oracle backend.

Additionally, I improved internal communication, resource reservation, group-interaction, and content management through a web-based collaboration system which served 170 international corporate locations. The system employed the iPlanet web server and a set of custom Perl scripts for threaded forums.
Consultant

SoftWeb Corporation

(Computer Software industry)

2000 — 2000 (less than a year)
eBusiness Project Manager

Community and Information Technology Institute

(Civic & Social Organization industry)

1999 — 2000 (1 year )

I implemented a strategic system that would enable the United Way of Central NY to serve the community better. Reengineered the grant giving process to focus on the ‘outcomes’ of the funding process (kids off drugs, people with jobs etc) as opposed to the ‘outputs’ (numbers of hours worked, phone calls made etc). I was responsible for managing the analysis, development and technology transfer of the web application that implemented the outcome based reporting system. I led two consulting teams to fulfill the engineering and training tasks
Research Programmer

MNIS-Textwise

(Computer Software industry)

1998 — 1999 (1 year )

I was the lead programmer for the EVA project. The goal of this project was to design, implement and evaluate an autonomous and evolving information retrieval agent that used cutting edge machine learning techniques to recover relevant documents from the web.

Shahzad Khan, PhD’s Education

University of Cambridge

PhD , Computer Science , 2004 — 2007

My area of research was in sentiment classification using linguistic analyses and machine learning. The title of my research thesis is 'Negation and Antonymy in Sentiment Classification'. I carried out my research as part of the <a href=http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/>Natural Language and Information Processing</a> group under the supervision of Dr. Ted Briscoe.
Syracuse University

MSc , Telecommunication and Network Management , 1998 — 2000

The Telecommunications and Network Management graduate degree offered at the School of Information Studies is a marriage of technology, policy and management. This programme gives IT professionals a broader view of how to apply and use networking technologies to solve business problems, provide strategic planning and consultancy, and design customer and business-need driven winning products.

Activities and Societies:

Phi Beta Delta International Honor Society
Lahore University of Management Sciences

BSc , Computer Science , 1994 — 1998

Additional Information

Shahzad Khan, PhD’s Websites:

Shahzad Khan, PhD’s Interests:

Machine Learning, computational linguistics, natural language processing, search engines, automatic summarization, machine translation, information extraction, social media, social networking analytics, blog analysis, subjectivity analysis, web based people profiling, automatic referral and recommendation systems, web analytics