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). I did my PhD in Computer Science under the supervision of Prof. Kevin Leyton-Brown at UBC as well.

During my postdoc, I will be teaching various courses for the Master of Data Science (MDS) program at UBC. I will also be 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 DSCI512: Algorithms and Data Structures in the MDS Program in October 2024.
- I will be teaching CPSC430: Computers and Society in the CS department in Winter 2024.
- I will be co-teaching CPSC430: Computers and Society in the CS department in Fall 2023.
- We have designed and (starting last year) deployed an open-source application that facilitates online and in-class student participation. You can check the details of this new participation application 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.

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.

Publications and Preprints

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]