Hasibur Rahman

Hasibur Rahman, Kenji Numata, Evelyn T Lai et al.

Serious illness conversations (SICs) align care with patients' values, goals, and preferences, yet they rarely occur in emergency departments (EDs), where time constraints and emotional burden often leave clinicians making high-stakes decisions without documented insight into what matters most to patients. We present a case study of ED GOAL-AI, a voice-based conversational agent for brief, structured values discussions with older adults in the ED, evaluated with 55 patients for feasibility and acceptability. Most participants completed the conversation and reported the interaction as acceptable and feasible, with ratings of feeling heard and understood comparable to clinicians. However, we also observed critical failure modes, including boundary violations such as hallucinated diagnostic statements, highlighting ethical and emotional risks. This work points to early promise for AI-mediated SICs while underscoring the need for careful boundary setting and participatory design before broader deployment.

Niharika Mathur, Hasibur Rahman, Smit Desai

Large Language Model-based Voice Assistants (LLM-VAs) are increasingly deployed in assistive settings for older adults, yet little is known about how an agent's personality shapes user perceptions of its explanations. This paper presents a mixed factorial experiment (N=140) examining how agreeableness and extraversion in an LLM-VA ("Robin") influence older adults' perceptions across seven measures: empathy, likeability, trust, reliance, satisfaction, intention to adopt, and perceived intelligence. Results reveal that high agreeableness drove stronger empathy perceptions, while low agreeableness consistently penalized likeability. Importantly, perceived intelligence remained unaffected by personality, suggesting that personality shapes sociability without altering competence perceptions. Real-time environmental explanations outperformed conversational history explanations on five measures, with advantages concentrated in emergency contexts. Notably, highly agreeable participants were especially critical of low-agreeableness agents, revealing a user-agent personality congruence effect. These findings offer design implications for personality-aware, context-sensitive LLM-VAs in assistive settings.

Hasibur Rahman, Hanan Salam

Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly implicated in interpersonal and societal decision-making, their ability to navigate explicit conflicts between legitimately different cultural value systems remains largely unexamined. Existing benchmarks predominantly target cultural knowledge (CulturalBench), value prediction (WorldValuesBench), or single-axis bias diagnostics (CDEval); none evaluate how LLMs adjudicate when multiple culturally grounded values directly clash. We address this gap with CCD-Bench, a benchmark that assesses LLM decision-making under cross-cultural value conflict. CCD-Bench comprises 2,182 open-ended dilemmas spanning seven domains, each paired with ten anonymized response options corresponding to the ten GLOBE cultural clusters. These dilemmas are presented using a stratified Latin square to mitigate ordering effects. We evaluate 17 non-reasoning LLMs. Models disproportionately prefer Nordic Europe (mean 20.2 percent) and Germanic Europe (12.4 percent), while options for Eastern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa are underrepresented (5.6 to 5.8 percent). Although 87.9 percent of rationales reference multiple GLOBE dimensions, this pluralism is superficial: models recombine Future Orientation and Performance Orientation, and rarely ground choices in Assertiveness or Gender Egalitarianism (both under 3 percent). Ordering effects are negligible (Cramer's V less than 0.10), and symmetrized KL divergence shows clustering by developer lineage rather than geography. These patterns suggest that current alignment pipelines promote a consensus-oriented worldview that underserves scenarios demanding power negotiation, rights-based reasoning, or gender-aware analysis. CCD-Bench shifts evaluation beyond isolated bias detection toward pluralistic decision making and highlights the need for alignment strategies that substantively engage diverse worldviews.

Hasibur Rahman, Smit Desai

Large language models (LLMs) enable conversational agents (CAs) to express distinctive personalities, raising new questions about how such designs shape user perceptions. This study investigates how personality expression levels and user-agent personality alignment influence perceptions in goal-oriented tasks. In a between-subjects experiment (N=150), participants completed travel planning with CAs exhibiting low, medium, or high expression across the Big Five traits, controlled via our novel Trait Modulation Keys framework. Results revealed an inverted-U relationship: medium expression produced the most positive evaluations across Intelligence, Enjoyment, Anthropomorphism, Intention to Adopt, Trust, and Likeability, significantly outperforming both extremes. Personality alignment further enhanced outcomes, with Extraversion and Emotional Stability emerging as the most influential traits. Cluster analysis identified three distinct compatibility profiles, with "Well-Aligned" users reporting substantially positive perceptions. These findings demonstrate that personality expression and strategic trait alignment constitute optimal design targets for CA personality, offering design implications as LLM-based CAs become increasingly prevalent.

Dharma Shukla, Muthian Sivathanu, Srinidhi Viswanatha et al.

Lowering costs by driving high utilization across deep learning workloads is a crucial lever for cloud providers. We present Singularity, Microsoft's globally distributed scheduling service for highly-efficient and reliable execution of deep learning training and inference workloads. At the heart of Singularity is a novel, workload-aware scheduler that can transparently preempt and elastically scale deep learning workloads to drive high utilization without impacting their correctness or performance, across a global fleet of AI accelerators (e.g., GPUs, FPGAs). All jobs in Singularity are preemptable, migratable, and dynamically resizable (elastic) by default: a live job can be dynamically and transparently (a) preempted and migrated to a different set of nodes, cluster, data center or a region and resumed exactly from the point where the execution was preempted, and (b) resized (i.e., elastically scaled-up/down) on a varying set of accelerators of a given type. Our mechanisms are transparent in that they do not require the user to make any changes to their code or require using any custom libraries that may limit flexibility. Additionally, our approach significantly improves the reliability of deep learning workloads. We show that the resulting efficiency and reliability gains with Singularity are achieved with negligible impact on the steady-state performance. Finally, our design approach is agnostic of DNN architectures and handles a variety of parallelism strategies (e.g., data/pipeline/model parallelism).

Kaushik Sarker, Hasibur Rahman, Khandaker Farzana Rahman et al.

Technology is an endless evolving expression in modern era, which increased security concerns and pushed us to create cyber environment. A National Cyber Security Strategy (NCSS) of a country reflects the state of that country's cyber strength which represents the aim and vision of the cyber security of a country. Formerly, researchers have worked on NCSS by comparing NCSS between different nations for international collaboration and harmonization and some researchers worked on policy framework for their respective governments. However very insignificant attempts had been made to assess the strategic strength of NCSS of Bangladesh by performing cross comparisons on NCSS of different Nations. Therefore, the motive of this research is to evaluate the robustness of the existing cyber security strategy of Bangladesh in comparison with some of the most technologically advanced countries in Asian continent and others like USA, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and India in order to keep the NCSS of Bangladesh up-to-date.