News
- I will be teaching DSCI563: Unsupervised Learning in the MDS Program in Feburary 2026.
- The third seminar in the AI and Education seminar series will be given by Dongwook Yoon in the ICICS Building in Feburary 2026. For more information please check here.
- I will be chairing a session on "Improving Student Sucess" at SIGCSE 2025.
- The second seminar in the AI and Education seminar series will be given by Elisa Baniassad at the IKB Learning Centre in March 2025. For more information, please check here.
- The first seminar in the AI and Education seminar series will be given by Patrick P. Pennefather at IKB Learning Centre in Janurary 2025. For more information please check here.
- I was assigned to be one of the co-chairs of the AI and Education seminar series at UBC, a collaboration between CTLT and CAIDA.
- I will be chairing a session on "Reaching New Audiences" at SIGCSE 2024.
- 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.
Courses Taught at UBC
- DSCI 513: Databases and Data Retrieval, MDS Program, November 2025.
- DSCI 512: Algorithms and Data Structures, MDS Program, October 2024, 2025.
- DSCI 541: Privacy, Ethics, and Security, MDS Program, March 2025.
- DSCI 553: Statistical Inference and Computation II, MDS Program, Feburary 2025.
- DSCI 542: Communication and Argumentation, MDS Program in January 2025.
- CPSC 430: Computers and Society, CS department, Fall 2023, Winter 2024.
Publications and Preprints
Authentic Data Science Assessments in a Computer-Based Testing Environment - (Working paper)
H. Zarkoob, K. Burak, Z. Warham, F. Moosvi
[pdf]
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.
- 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.
