I am a Postdoctoral Associate at George Washington University where I work with The Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) and Graph Lab.
I obtained my PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Boston University where I was a core member of the Security Lab (SeclaBU) and collaborated with the International Data-driven Research for Advanced Modeling and Analysis Lab (iDrama Lab).
Research
My research lies on the cusp of cybersafety, applied machine learning and social computing, where I aim at understanding, detecting, and combating online harms using a data-driven approach. My research process involves identifying pertinent issues within cyberspace and developing tools to mitigate the malicious behavior with the goal of offering policymakers guidelines to ensure user safety on social media platforms.
My work has been published in top-tier venues in security and web measurement, including IEEE S&P, ICWSM, WebSci and has been reported by Wired. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Publications
Enabling Contextual Soft Moderation on Social Media through Contrastive Textual Deviation
P. Paudel, M. H. Saeed, R. Auger, C. Wells and G. Stringhini
33rd Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX 2024), 2024
Unraveling the Web of Disinformation: Exploring the Larger Context of State-Sponsored Influence Campaigns on Twitter
M. H. Saeed, S. Ali, P. Paudel, J. Blackburn and G. Stringhini
International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2024), 2024
TUBERAIDER: Attributing Coordinated Hate Attacks on YouTube Videos to their Source Communities
M. H. Saeed, K. Papadamou, J. Blackburn, E. D. Cristofaro and G. Stringhini
18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2024), 2024
TrollMagnifier: Detecting State-Sponsored Troll Accounts on Reddit
M. H. Saeed, S. Ali, J. Blackburn, E. D. Cristofaro, S. Zannettou and G. Stringhini
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2022), 2022
There are N Impostors Among Us: Understanding the Effect of State-Sponsored Troll Accounts on Reddit Discussions
M. H. Saeed, J. Blackburn, G. Stringhini
International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats (CySoc 2022), 2022
Understanding the Effect of Deplatforming on Social Networks
S. Ali, M. H. Saeed, E. Aldreabi, J. Blackburn, E. D. Cristofaro, S. Zannettou, and G. Stringhini
In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021 (WebSci ’21), 2021
The Browsers Strike Back: Countering Cryptojacking and Parasitic Miners on the Web
R. Tahir, S. Durrani, F. Ahmed, H. Saeed, F. Zaffar and S. Ilyas
IEEE Conference on Computer Communications 2019 (INFOCOM 2019), 2019
Bringing the Kid back into YouTube Kids: Detecting Inappropriate Content on Video Streaming Platforms
R. Tahir, F. Ahmed, H. Saeed, S. Ali, F. Zaffar and C. Wilson
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2019), 2019
Service
Reviewer: CSCW (2024), Journal of Information Technology & Politics (2024), Crime Science Journal (2024), EPJ Data Science (2024)
Program Committee Service: EuroS&P Workshop on Attackers and Cyber-Crime Operations (2024), USENIX AEC (2024)
Teaching
Courses TA’ed at Boston University:
Spring 2021 EC 327 Software Engineering
Fall 2020 EC 327 Software Engineering