Ash Ashokan

Biography

Ashwathy is Instructor of Computer Science in the College of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Prior to becoming an instructor, she worked as an Application Developer at Union Pacific (UP) a Fortune 500 company based out of Omaha, Nebraska. At UP, Ashwathy was responsible for understanding customer requirements, preparing SDP documents, developing applications, and testing them. She also handled production support, and was involved in imparting application/domain knowledge to interns. Ashwathy's other corporate experience include working as a Project Engineer at Wipro Technologies automating functional test cases for client projects and developing automation scripts for stress and load testing. Ashwathy was also a Software Development Engineer in Test at Microsoft where she conceptualized, designed, and developed a metro style app for Microsoft's then next generation Operating System - Windows 8. She was also the co-owner of the functional specifications and development design document.While she is teaching she is also currently pursing her PhD in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning specifically in areas of algorithmic fairness and recommender systems from University of Nebraska Omaha. Ashwathy has a Master's Degree in Computer Science from University of Nebraska Omaha(UNO) with thesis in the area of hadoop and text mining. Her research publications include Fairness metrics and bias mitigation strategies for rating predictions. Ashokan, Ashwathy, and Christian Haas. Information Processing & Management 58.5 (2021). Hotspot of Topics From Timestamped Documents, Ashwathy Ashokan, Parvathi Chundi, LAP Publishing 2013, and MapReduce Style Algorithms for Extracting Hot Spots of Topics from Timestamped Corpus, Ashwathy Ashokan, Parvathi Chundi, Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology 2014. She also has an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from National Institute of Technology Calicut(NITC), Kerala, India.Ashwathy has volunteered at several Omaha organizations such as Open Door Mission, Girls Who Code, Nebraska AIDS project, at local Omaha schools etc. As a Master's student at UNO, she was the recipient of 'Best Graduate Student for Service' Award for her outstanding GPA and work for the Graduate Dean's office, along with being the recipient of UNO Advantage Scholarship from International Studies and Program. She is also the recipient of the Special Faculty Development Fellowship as she pursues her PhD.

Teaching Interests

Computer Science Principles, Web Programming, Java Programming

Research Interests

Text Mining, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems, Search Engines, Algorithmic Fairness, Machine Learning

Service Summary

>Instructor At UNO, August 2014-Present>Application Developer at Union Pacific, May 2012-July 2014>Adjunct Faculty, UNO January 2014-May 2014>Software Development Engineer in Test Intern, Microsoft Corporation, May 2011-August 2011>Graduate Assistant, Office of Graduate Studies, UNO August 2010-May 2012>Project Engineer, Wipro Technologies, June 2007-October 2008

Education

MS, University of Nebraska Omaha, Omaha, Nebraska, Computer Science, Data Mining, Text Mining, MapReduce, Hadoop, 2013

Other, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Calicut, India, Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, 2007

Professional Development

Faculty Fellowship, Special Faculty Development Program, 01/01/2018 - 05/01/2023

Selected Publications

Ashokan, Ash, Chundi, Parvathi. 2013. Hotspots of Topics from Time Stamped Document: The MapReduce Way, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing.

Ashokan, Ashwathy. 2014. MapReduce Style Algorithms for Extracting Hot Spots of Topics from Timestamped Corpus, Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, 3, 4140.

Ashokan, Ashwathy, Haas, Christian. Fairness Metrics and Bias Mitigation Strategies for Rating Predictions, Information Processing and Management.

Department, College, and University

UNO's Women in IT Initiative, Committee Member, Attend monthly meetings and help organize event, volunteer at events etc., 01/01/2015 - 01/31/2015