Hedayat (Heddy) Zarkoob
hzarkoob[at]cs[dot]ubc[dot]ca

I am a postdoc in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where I also did my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Kevin Leyton-Brown.

During my postdoc, I am teaching various courses for the Master of Data Science (MDS) program at UBC. I am also doing reseach on the intersection of AI and Education, including using AI and technology to promote Active Learning practices in large-scale academic settings.

Before joining UBC, I received my MSc in Computer Science under the supervision of Prof. Andrei Bulatov at Simon Fraser University.

News

- I will be teaching DSCI 541: Privacy, Ethics, and Security in the MDS Program in March 2025.
- I will be teaching DSCI 553: Statistical Inference and Computation II in the MDS Program in Feburary 2025.
- I will be teaching DSCI 542: Communication and Argumentation in the MDS Program in January 2025.
- I will be teaching DSCI 512: Algorithms and Data Structures in the MDS Program in October 2024.
- I will be teaching CPSC 430: Computers and Society in the CS department in Winter 2024.
- I will be co-teaching CPSC 430: Computers and Society in the CS department in Fall 2023.
- We have designed and deployed Agora, an open-source application that facilitates online and in-class student participation. For more information about Agora, please check here.
- I was very lucky to be one of the AAAI 2021's Workflow Chairs. You can check our paper on the innovations and experiences in AAAI2021 and their detailed analysis here.

Publications and Preprints

Expanding the Horizons of Autograding: Innovative Questions at UBC - 2025
ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS 2025)
J. Niu, J. Wong, C. Lake, J. Rahardjo, H. Zarkoob, O. Ola, P. Belleville, K. Mochetti, M. Allen, F. Moosvi, S. Wolfman
[pdf]

AI-powered Methods for Academic Assessment: Overcoming Scalability Challenges in Large University Classrooms and Conference Review - 2024
UBC Library (PhD thesis)
[pdf]

Agora: Motivating and Measuring Engagement in Large-Class Discussions - 2024
ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2024)
H. Zarkoob, S. Nand, K. Leyton-Brown, G. Toti
[pdf]

Mechanical TA 2: Peer Grading With TA and Algorithmic Support - 2024
ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS 2024)
H. Zarkoob, K. Leyton-Brown
[pdf]

Matching Papers and Reviewers at Large Conferences - 2024
The Journal of Artificial Intelligence (AIJ 2024)
K. Leyton-Brown, Mausam, Y. Nandwani*, H. Zarkoob*, C. Cameron, N. Newman, D. Raghu
* Joint student lead authors
[pdf]

Better Peer Grading through Bayesian Inference - 2023
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023)
H. Zarkoob, G. d'Eon, L. Podina, K. Leyton-Brown
[pdf]

Mechanical TA 2: A System for Peer Grading with TA Support - 2021
(CoRR)
H. Zarkoob, F. Abdolhosseini, K. Leyton-Brown
[pdf]

Report-sensitive spot-checking in peer grading systems - 2020
Nineteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems AAMAS 2020
(This article supersedes an AAMAS 2019 extended abstract with the same title)
H. Zarkoob, H. Fu, K. Leyton-Brown
[pdf]

Smarter Parking: Using AI to Identify Parking Inefficiencies in Vancouver - 2019
(CoRR)
D. Graham , S. K. Sarraf, T. Lundy, A. MohammadMehr, S. Uppal, T. Y. Lee, H. Zarkoob, S. D. Kominers, K. Leyton-Brown
[pdf]

Optimizing one-way car sharing systems - 2015
SFU Library (Masters thesis)
[pdf]

Projects

I am leading a project on redesigning and re-implementing a partially automated web-based peer grading system called Mechanical TA (MTA). The key difference from other peer-grading systems is that MTA uses TAs to perform selective spot-checks and thus incentivizes high-quality grading. For more information abour MTA checkout here. Also, here is a link to an early version of the application.
- Recently, we have added new functionality to MTA, which we refer to as Agora. Agora is designed to facilitate online and in-class student participation. For more details check here.