Jannat Ara Meem

I am a PhD candidate at UC Riverside with a focus on information retrieval, LLM reasoning, and agentic AI. I also bring industry experience from Samsung Research America, where I built LLM-driven models and agentic workflows for large-scale voice assistant systems. I am currently seeking full-time Research Scientist / Applied Scientist roles starting June 2026.

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science, University of California, Riverside
  May 2026 (Expected)

  Advisor: Vagelis Hristidis

• M.S., Computer Science, University of California, Riverside
  December 2024

• B.Sc., Computer Science, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
  April 2019

Research & Industry Experience

Research and Engineering Intern

Advanced Intelligence Lab, Samsung Research America, Mountain View, CA
June 2025 – September 2025

• Worked on agentic orchestration workflows for voice assistant solutions
• Designed LLM-driven agents for multi-step reasoning
• Built specialized domain agents using RL

NLP Intern

Bixby Lab, Samsung Research America, Mountain View, CA
June–Sept 2024; July–Sept 2023

• Designed LLM-powered program synthesis methods
• Fine-tuned open-source LLMs for reasoning, planning, and factuality

Graduate Student Researcher

UC Riverside, 2021–Present

• Specialized retriever–ranker and agentic pipelines
• Present-anchored temporal QA (PAT-QA)
• LLM re-ranking (EcoRank)
• Out-of-schema QA (ECML-PKDD)
• Conversational open retrieval QA (ICSC)

Publications

Modeling the Impact of Out-of-schema Questions in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

Jannat Ara Meem, Muhammad Shihab Rashid, and Vagelis Hristidis
ECML PKDD '24 (in collaboration with Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal)

EcoRank: Budget-Constrained Text Re-ranking Using Large Language Models

Muhammad Shihab Rashid, Jannat Ara Meem, Yue Dong, and Vagelis Hristidis
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL '24)

PAT-Questions: A Self-Updating Benchmark for Present-Anchored Temporal Question-Answering

Jannat Ara Meem, Muhammad Shihab Rashid, Yue Dong, and Vagelis Hristidis
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL '24)

NORMY: Non-Uniform History Modeling for Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering

Muhammad Shihab Rashid, Jannat Ara Meem, and Vagelis Hristidis
18th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC '24)

Distributed Principal Component Analysis for Real-time Big Data Processing

Jannat Ara Meem, Farzana Y. Ahmad, and Muhammad Abdullah Adnan
7th International Conference on Networking, Systems and Security (NSysS-2020)

Teaching Experience

• Graduate Teaching Assistant, UC Riverside
  Courses: Intro to NLP, IR & Web Search, Data Analytics & Exploration, Spatial Computing

• Lecturer, United International University
  Courses: Structured Programming, OOP, Data Structures & Algorithms, Machine Learning

Technical Skills

Languages: Python, C/C++, Java, Bash, SQL
LLM & ML: PyTorch, HuggingFace Transformers, LoRA/PEFT, DeepSpeed, vLLM
Retrieval & IR: Pyserini, Lucene, FAISS, BM25
Agentic AI: LangChain, LlamaIndex, custom multi-agent frameworks
Distributed / Data: Spark, Ray, Hadoop
Tools: Docker, Git, Slurm, Linux, Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-learn

Service & Awards

• Peer Reviewer: ACL, SIGSPATIAL, SIGMOD, EDBT, DMAH
• Academic Service: Conference reviews, mentoring, volunteering, research presentations
• Awards: Graduate Year Fellowship at UCR