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

I am a PhD student in computer science at the University of British Columbia (UBC) under supervisions of Prof. Kevin Leyton-Brown. I am interested in using cutting-edge AI tools to improve peer evaluation and grading systems. I am also generally interested in Algorithm Game Theory, Mechanism Design, and Theory of Computer Science. I am affiliated with the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI) and the Algorithms Lab.

Before joining UBC, I received my M.Sc. in computer science under the supervision of Prof. Andrei Bulatov at Simon Fraser University.

News

- 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 the "participation application". The participation application is designed to facilitate online and in-class student participation. For more details check here.

Publications and Preprints

Matching Papers and Reviewers at Large Conferences - 2022
(Working paper)
K. Leyton-Brown, Mausam, Y. Nandwani*, H. Zarkoob*, C. Cameron, N. Newman, D. Raghu
* Joint student lead authors
[pdf]

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

Report-sensitive spot-checking in peer grading systems - 2020
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
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]