Younes Karimi

I work as the Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at LingoPal.ai, where I employ, develop, enhance, and deploy various state-of-the-art machine learning, natural language processing and audio processing models, tools, and techniques.

I recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Informatics from the College of IST of Penn State University. My Ph.D. research fell at the intersection of social network mining, cybersecurity, and natural language processing. I mainly worked with Prof. Anna Squicciarini and Prof. Shomir Wilson, and I was part of the Privacy in Social Computing lab and the Human Language Technologies Lab.
My studies were primarily focused on extremist and terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/Daesh) and the Islamic Regime in Iran (IR/IRI). I investigated their techniques and strategies for disseminating propagandistic messages on online social networks (OSNs), especially Twitter/X, and for manipulating online communities, influencing people, recruiting new members, and gaining global support. I collected tens of millions of tweets, fine-tuned large language models such as ParsBERT and XLM-RoBERTa, and built tweet and user classifiers for automated identification of users supporting the authoritarian regime in Iran. I further modeled and clustered the behavior of users and analyzed their connections, support networks, and potential influence.
Besides, I worked on two corpora containing millions of privacy policies and question-answer pairs extracted from them and preparing them for public release. I performed large-scale analysis on these datasets to identify common patterns and practices and unique characteristics of the policy documents. I also worked on the privacy of OSNs and used machine learning–based approaches for timely and automated detection of malicious disclosures of sensitive private information on Twitter.

I received my M.Sc. in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, where I worked on a DARPA project to detect and defend NASA JPL employees against phishing, spear phishing, and social engineering attacks in different communication channels such as Email, SMS, and LinkedIn. Besides, I conducted research on online user reviews of Google Play Store Android applications and customer reviews of Amazon products to identify their privacy and security aspects and corresponding user opinions, concerns and complaints. I also studied conformance testing of access control models, security and access control inference of web applications, and privacy of mobile applications.