I am a 5th year PhD Student at Boston University Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. I am also a core member of the Security Lab (SeclaBU) and collaborated with International Data-driven Research for Advanced Modeling and Analysis Lab (iDrama Lab) in the past.

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

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