TONMOY HASAN
thasan1@[Link] ˛ LinkedIn ˛ Google Scholar
+1(980) 282-9969 ˛ Charlotte, NC, USA
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Computer Science (in progress) Aug 2022 – Dec 2026
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA
M.S. in Computer Science Aug 2022 – May 2025
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA
B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering Jan 2016 – Feb 2021
Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology, Rajshahi, Bangladesh
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Recommender Systems, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models
EXPERIENCE
§ Graduate Research Assistant @ Computer Science, UNC Charlotte Aug 2022 – Present
• Topic-Level Bayesian Surprise and Serendipity for Recommender Systems
– Formalized content-based serendipity for recommender systems using Bayesian surprise and collaborative filtering.
– Introduced a novel dataset derived from Goodreads to evaluate topic-level serendipity recommendations.
• Leveraging Affective State Preferences in Recommender System
– Introduced a novel recommendation setting that models explicit affective state preferences.
– Developed a Transformer-based recommender system that jointly learns short-term and long-term affective preferences,
outperforming previous state of the art baselines.
– Created a large-scale dataset of over 10,000 fine-grained affective-cognitive statements mined from Goodreads reviews.
• Ongoing Projects
1. A suite of computational and statistical models of surprise and serendipity in recommender systems.
2. Methods for eliciting fine-grained affective state preferences to enhance personalization in recommender systems.
§ Graduate Teaching Assistant @ Computer Science, UNC Charlotte Aug 2024 – Present
• Supported graduate (Machine Learning) and undergraduate (Introduction to Computer Vision) level courses by holding office
hours, grading, designing tutorials, and helping students clarify concepts.
§ Research Internship @ Civil Engineering, UNC Charlotte May 2024 – Aug 2024
• Developed a dataset and NLP models for emotion and sentiment analysis of construction workers’ mental health.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
1. T. Hasan and R. Bunescu. “A Text-Based Recommender System that Leverages Explicit Affective State Preferences”. Pro-
ceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2025. (Oral)
2. T. Hasan and R. Bunescu. “Topic-level Bayesian surprise and serendipity for recommender systems”. Proceedings of the 17th
ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, (RecSys). 2023.
3. T. Hasan and R. Bunescu. “A Survey of Affective Recommender Systems: Modeling Attitudes, Emotions, and Moods for
Personalization”. Under review at ACM Computing Surveys, (CSUR). 2025.
4. T. Hasan, A. Matin, and M. S. R. Joy. “Machine learning based automatic classification of customer sentiment”. Proceedings
of the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT). 2020.
GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES TAKEN
Machine Learning, Optimization for Machine Learning and Data Science, Advanced Computer Vision, Algorithms and Data Struc-
tures, Intelligent Systems
TECHNICAL SKILLS
Programming Languages Python, C++, MATLAB
Libraries / Frameworks PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn