https://kasra-hosseini.com/Recent content on Kasra Hosseinihttps://kasra-hosseini.com/images/kasra.jpghttps://kasra-hosseini.com/images/kasra.jpgHugo -- 0.153.5en-usFri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2026/conversational-agents-production/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2026/conversational-agents-production/This paper presents a framework for evaluating and improving a large-scale multi-agent shopping assistant in production, combining grounded user simulation, targeted assertions, and baseline comparisons with paired bootstrap intervals to separate real improvements from run-to-run fluctuation.https://kasra-hosseini.com/posts/2026/delegation-patterns-field-guide/Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/posts/2026/delegation-patterns-field-guide/A searchable reference of 59 delegation patterns for multi-agent systems, in nine families: what each does, when to reach for it, and how it fails.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2026/upflow-obs-array-performance/Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2026/upflow-obs-array-performance/This paper reports on the largest and longest ocean bottom seismometer experiment to date in the Atlantic Ocean, documenting ~91% data completeness, reduced long-period noise, and recordings ranging from Earth's free oscillations to whale calls across the Azores-Madeira-Canary Islands region.https://kasra-hosseini.com/posts/2026/agent-fabric-part1/Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/posts/2026/agent-fabric-part1/Why AI agents may form societies, share knowledge at global scale, and why adaptive structures could become the norm.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2026/charting-the-mantle/Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2026/charting-the-mantle/This article describes the UPFLOW project's deployment of the largest passive seafloor seismic experiment to date in the Atlantic Ocean, targeting poorly understood mantle upwellings beneath the Azores-Madeira-Canary Islands region and opening avenues for interdisciplinary research in marine biology and oceanography.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2026/mapreader-book-chapter/Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2026/mapreader-book-chapter/This book chapter introduces computational map studies as a field and presents MapReader's patch-based approach to analyzing digitized map collections at scale, arguing that automation and critical humanities interpretation are complementary when software design foregrounds the argumentative nature of maps as historical sources.https://kasra-hosseini.com/posts/2025/llm-as-a-judge-relevance-assessment-paper-announcement/Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/posts/2025/llm-as-a-judge-relevance-assessment-paper-announcement/How we built a multimodal LLM framework for large-scale product retrieval evaluation at Zalando, achieving human-comparable annotation quality at 1,000x lower cost. Published at ECIR 2025.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2025/retrieve-annotate-evaluate/Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2025/retrieve-annotate-evaluate/This paper proposes a multimodal LLM-based framework for large-scale product retrieval evaluation that generates query-specific annotation guidelines and conducts relevance assessments, achieving human-comparable quality at 1,000x lower cost on a large e-commerce platform.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2025/automated-plant-phenotyping/Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2025/automated-plant-phenotyping/This study adapts the MapReader computer vision pipeline to automatically segment and classify five plant structures in whole oilseed rape images, achieving a weighted F1-score of 97.71 and demonstrating the transferability of humanities-developed image analysis tools to agricultural science.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2024/mapreader-joss/Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2024/mapreader-joss/MapReader is an open-source interdisciplinary software library for processing digitized maps and images via patch classification and text spotting, supporting both small manually-annotated datasets and large-scale automated analysis across humanities and natural science applications.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2023/fireball-seismoacoustic-detection/Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2023/fireball-seismoacoustic-detection/Using 26 seismometers and two infrasound arrays, this study detects and characterizes a small meteoroid that exploded unseen over the North Atlantic in 2022, demonstrating that seismoacoustic methods combined with satellite data can systematically detect fireballs without relying on human observations.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2023/hunting-for-treasure/Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2023/hunting-for-treasure/This chapter describes the Living with Machines project's approach to the British Library's digitised newspaper collection, introducing Press Picker — an interactive tool for exploring the temporal and geographic distribution of newspaper titles — and surveying how digitised newspapers have been used in humanities research.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2023/ten-simple-rules/Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2023/ten-simple-rules/This paper presents ten pragmatic rules for researchers who need to use, modify, or build upon existing research software, covering four phases — planning, understanding, making changes, and publishing — while acknowledging the practical constraints of academic research environments.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2022/faking-feature-importance/Wed, 02 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2022/faking-feature-importance/This paper demonstrates that differentially-private synthetic data often fails to reliably preserve feature importance rankings from real-world datasets, cautioning against its use for exploratory machine learning in sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2022/toponym-resolution-dataset/Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2022/toponym-resolution-dataset/This paper presents a manually annotated dataset of 3,364 toponyms from 343 nineteenth-century English newspaper articles across four locations, designed as a benchmark for developing and evaluating toponym resolution methods on noisy historical text.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2022/mapreader/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2022/mapreader/MapReader is an open-source Python library that enables users with minimal computer vision expertise to retrieve, patch, annotate, and classify large historical map collections using deep learning — demonstrated on approximately 16,000 nineteenth-century British maps comprising over 30 million patches.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/indian-slab-migration/Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/indian-slab-migration/Using seismic tomography and plate kinematics, this paper shows that the Indian slab migrated approximately 1,000 km laterally through the mantle, driven by subduction of the neighboring Australian slab — demonstrating that slabs in the same plate network must be interpreted collectively to avoid significant plate reconstruction errors.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/indo-african-mantle-plumes/Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/indo-african-mantle-plumes/Combining new seismological datasets, this study reveals that Indo-African mantle upwellings form a tree-like structure — a central trunk below ~1,500 km depth with three tilting branches extending toward different hotspots — overturning the classical picture of thin, vertical plume conduits.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/time-makes-sense/Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/time-makes-sense/This paper introduces time-sensitive Targeted Sense Disambiguation (TSD) for historical texts, showing that BERT models trained on nineteenth-century English consistently outperform modern language models and that time-aware disambiguation methods are especially valuable for older documents.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/neural-language-models-19th-century/Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/neural-language-models-19th-century/This paper presents four types of neural language models — word2vec, fastText, BERT, and Flair — trained on approximately 5.1 billion tokens of nineteenth-century English books (1760–1900), consistently improving downstream task performance on historical documents compared to models trained on modern text.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/south-america-subduction/Sun, 16 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/south-america-subduction/Using the DETOX-P1 multifrequency P-wave tomography model, this paper identifies four distinct slab provinces beneath South America and infers a major tectonic reconfiguration around 85 Ma — from offshore intra-oceanic subduction to the eastward Andean subduction that built the modern Andes.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/ordnance-survey-maps/Sat, 17 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2021/ordnance-survey-maps/This paper introduces a computer vision pipeline for analyzing thousands of digitized nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps simultaneously, enabling new forms of spatial historical inquiry at scales previously impractical through individual map examination.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/living-machines/Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/living-machines/This paper introduces the first dataset for atypical animacy detection and a fully unsupervised BERT-based pipeline for identifying when typically inanimate objects—specifically machines in 19th-century English text—are described with animate attributes. The method substantially outperforms baselines and provides evidence of how industrialisation reshaped linguistic representations of machines as active agents.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/toponym-matching/Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/toponym-matching/This paper applies deep neural network architectures to the task of geographical candidate selection through toponym matching, handling cross-lingual variations, regional name differences, and OCR errors in historical text. Evaluation on English and Spanish datasets shows strong performance, enabling more accurate downstream geographic entity resolution in digitized archives.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/deezymatch/Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/deezymatch/DeezyMatch is an open-source deep learning library for fuzzy string matching and candidate ranking that supports transfer learning, making it practical when only limited training data are available. Its candidate ranker uses vector representations and an adaptive search algorithm to efficiently identify best-matching strings in large knowledge bases.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/tomotectonic-plate-reconstruction/Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/tomotectonic-plate-reconstruction/This paper presents a continuously closing plate reconstruction of western North America and the eastern Pacific basin from 170 Ma to present using tomotectonic analysis—combining seismic tomography of subducted mantle slabs with surface geological data. The model reveals that the eastern Pacific was broken into several smaller plates with simultaneous east- and west-directed subduction beneath a vast intraoceanic archipelago, overturning the long-held view of simple Farallon plate subduction.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/smart-monitoring-conservation/Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/smart-monitoring-conservation/This report presents an NLP pipeline developed with WWF to automatically detect news articles reporting emerging threats to protected conservation areas, combining active learning with fine-tuned BERT models. The best-performing system achieved 96% recall and 82% precision, demonstrating the feasibility of near-real-time automated conservation threat monitoring at scale.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/ocr-quality-nlp/Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/ocr-quality-nlp/This study systematically quantifies how OCR quality affects six downstream NLP tasks—including named entity recognition, dependency parsing, and topic modelling—using popular out-of-the-box tools on digitized historical text. Results show a consistent degradation with declining OCR quality, with some tasks more irreparably harmed than others, providing practical guidelines for researchers working with heritage digitization.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/india-asia-collision/Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2020/india-asia-collision/This review integrates Tibetan bedrock geology, seismic tomographic images of subducted slabs, and plate kinematic constraints to evaluate competing models for the India-Asia collision and the post-Triassic Tethys oceans. It finds that no single reconstruction satisfies all constraints, pointing to fundamental gaps in understanding suture zones and the limits of continental subduction.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2019/resolving-places-past-present/Tue, 05 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2019/resolving-places-past-present/This paper presents a toponym resolution approach for historical British newspapers that combines contemporary knowledge bases with modern gazetteers to link place names in 19th-century text to real-world locations. It introduces an expansive definition of locatable entities and uses contextual disambiguation, enabling fine-grained geographic analysis of digitized newspaper archives.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2019/global-mantle-structure/Sun, 01 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2019/global-mantle-structure/This study presents three new global P-wave tomography models (DETOX-P1/P2/P3) of Earth's mantle, introducing the first large-scale inversion of core-diffracted Pdiff waves at the highest possible frequencies. The resulting lowermost-mantle resolution matches or exceeds that of global S-wave models, revealing that the two canonical large low-shear-velocity provinces may instead form a globe-spanning chain of smaller slow patches.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2019/insight-blind-test/Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2019/insight-blind-test/In preparation for NASA's InSight mission, 84 teams from 20 countries participated in a blind test to detect and characterise marsquakes embedded in a year-long synthetic single-station dataset. This paper evaluates the submissions, summarising the most successful detection strategies and the lessons learned for building a global seismicity catalog from a single planetary seismometer.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2019/axisem3d/Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2019/axisem3d/AxiSEM3D is a hybrid spectral-element/pseudospectral method for simulating global seismic wave propagation in realistic 3-D Earth models with undulating discontinuities. By parametrizing the azimuthal dimension with an adaptive Fourier series, it achieves two to three orders of magnitude speedup over full 3-D methods while supporting simulations up to 1 Hz.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2018/training-martian-seismologists/Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2018/training-martian-seismologists/This article describes the blind-test exercise organised by the InSight marsquake service to prepare analysts for detecting and characterising seismic events on Mars using a single seismometer. It outlines the unique challenges of Martian seismology and the strategies developed to identify signals in an unfamiliar planetary noise environment.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2018/submachine/Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2018/submachine/SubMachine is a suite of web-based tools for the interactive visualization and comparison of over 45 global and regional seismic tomography models of Earth's interior. By providing browser-accessible exploration alongside complementary datasets such as plate reconstructions and gravity anomalies, it lowers the barrier to collaborative research across the solid Earth community.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2017/obspydmt/Thu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2017/obspydmt/ObspyDMT is an open-source Python toolbox that unifies query, retrieval, processing, and quality control of large seismological datasets from multiple data centers, usable either as a command-line tool without Python knowledge or as an importable module in automated workflows.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2017/lower-mantle-slabs/Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2017/lower-mantle-slabs/Vote maps across 14 global P- and S-wave tomography models quantify the consistency of positive seismic anomalies interpreted as subducted slabs in the lower mantle, revealing a peak in cross-model agreement at 1000-1400 km depth and a pronounced minimum around 2000 km.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2016/phd-thesis/Mon, 30 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2016/phd-thesis/PhD thesis developing a global multiple-frequency seismic tomography framework that combines the largest collected dataset of Pdiff traveltime measurements with teleseismic P and PP data to image whole-mantle structure, revealing sharp slab geometries, mantle plumes, and subdivisions of Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2016/rhum-rum-obs-network/Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2016/rhum-rum-obs-network/Performance report for the RHUM-RUM experiment, a 13-month deployment of 57 broadband ocean-bottom seismometers around La Réunion in the Indian Ocean, achieving 80% seismometer data recovery and characterizing the noise trade-offs between integrated DEPAS and separated INSU instrument designs.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2015/pdiff-measurements/Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2015/pdiff-measurements/A method for routinely measuring multifrequency finite-frequency traveltimes of core-diffracted P waves (Pdiff), yielding 479,559 traveltime anomalies across eight frequency bands from 1,857 earthquakes to enable global waveform tomography of the lowermost mantle.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2015/instaseis/Tue, 16 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2015/instaseis/Instaseis pre-computes and stores global Green's functions from AxiSEM in a database, enabling near-instantaneous (millisecond) extraction of arbitrary broadband seismograms at any source-receiver combination with 4th-order spatial accuracy.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2014/axisem/Wed, 04 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2014/axisem/AxiSEM is an open-source spectral-element method that computes broadband 3-D global seismic wavefields at a fraction of conventional cost by exploiting axisymmetry to reduce the computational domain from 3-D to 2-D while retaining full 3-D wavefield accuracy.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2013/obspyload/Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2013/obspyload/ObsPyLoad is a fully automated Python tool for querying and downloading seismological waveform data and metadata from multiple data centers (IRIS and ORFEUS) via a single command-line interface, removing the manual burden of data retrieval and format homogenization.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2012/thermoelastic-waves/Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2012/thermoelastic-waves/Direct finite element analysis of thermoelastic wave behavior at the interface of one-dimensional layered media, comparing classical and generalized thermoelasticity theories and revealing how multilayer structures produce markedly different wave distributions from single-layer cases.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2011/fgm-thermomechanical/Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2011/fgm-thermomechanical/Hybrid Fourier-Laplace transform solution for the dynamic response of simply supported functionally graded plates under combined thermomechanical loading, accounting for through-thickness property gradation and heat flux boundary conditions.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2011/fgm-truncated-cone/Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2011/fgm-truncated-cone/Finite element analysis via the Rayleigh-Ritz energy method for a functionally graded thick truncated cone under axisymmetric hydrostatic internal pressure, examining how cone geometry and power-law material gradation affect displacement and stress distributions.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2011/fgm-plates/Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2011/fgm-plates/Analytical solution for the static, dynamic, and free vibration behavior of functionally graded material plates using first- and third-order shear deformation theories combined with Fourier series and Laplace transforms.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2010/thermoelasticity-layer/Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2010/thermoelasticity-layer/Analytical solution for one-dimensional coupled thermoelasticity of a finite layer using Lord-Shulman and Green-Lindsay generalized theories, with Laplace transform and Fourier expansion to compare temperature, displacement, and stress distributions across classical and generalized models.https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2010/thermoelastic-wave-propagation/Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000https://kasra-hosseini.com/papers/2010/thermoelastic-wave-propagation/Finite element simulation of elastic and thermoelastic wave propagation in two-dimensional domains using both classical and generalized coupled thermoelasticity theories, comparing how thermal and mechanical waves evolve under different boundary conditions.