Biography
Md. Sultan Al Nahian's research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models and Reinforcement Learning (RL), applied in two areas of AI: AI Value Alignment and Biomedical AI. In AI Value Alignment, he works on advanced NLP and multi-modal machine learning techniques, combined with RL, to align AI agents with human values and preferences. In Biomedical AI, he focuses on biomedical information extraction (relation extraction, entity recognition, question answering) and applications of AI in healthcare. Before joining Penn State Harrisburg, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Kentucky. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky.
Research Interests
- Artificial Intelligence
- Natural Language Processing
- Reinforcement Learning
- AI Value Alignment
- Biomedical AI
- Large Language Models
Publications
Md Sultan Al Nahian, Ramakanth Kavuluru. "RadQA-DPO: A Radiology Question Answering System with Encoder-Decoder Models Enhanced by Direct Preference Optimization", Proceedings of the 24th Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing (BioNLP 2025).
Motasem Obeidat, Md Sultan Al Nahian, Ramakanth Kavuluru. “Do LLMs Surpass Encoders for Biomedical NER?” 13th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2025).
Vinu Ekanayake, Md Sultan Al Nahian, Ramakanth Kavuluru. “Mining Social Media for Barriers to Opioid Recovery with LLMs”, CL4Health at The Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2025.
Md Sultan Al Nahian, Tasmia Tasrin, Spencer Frazier, Mark Riedl, and Brent Harrison. “The Goofus & Gallant Story Corpus for Practical Value Alignment”, 23rd IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA 2024).
Motasem Obeidat, Vinu Ekanayake, Md Sultan Al Nahian, Ramakanth Kavuluru. “Language Model Methods for Health Entity Tagging and Classification on Social Media (Tasks 4 & 5)”. In Proceedings of The 9th Social Media Mining for Health Research and Applications (SMM4H 2024) Workshop and Shared Tasks (2024).
Md Sultan Al Nahian, Spencer Frazier, Mark Riedl, and Brent Harrison. “Training Value-Aligned Reinforcement Learning Agents Using a Normative Prior”. In IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (2023).
Tasmia Tasrin, Md Sultan Al Nahian, Habarakadage Perera, and Brent Harrison. “Influencing Reinforcement Learning through Natural Language Guidance”, In Proceedings of the 34th International FLAIRS Conference (2021).
Md Sultan Al Nahian, Tasmia Tasrin, and Brent Harrison. “Visual Question Answering Using Semantic Information from Image Descriptions”, In Proceedings of the 34th International FLAIRS Conference (2021).
Md Sultan Al Nahian, Spencer Frazier, Mark Riedl, and Brent Harrison. “Learning Norms from Stories: A Prior for Value Aligned Agents”, In Proceedings of the 3rd AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2020).
Md Sultan Al Nahian, Tasmia Tasrin, Sagar Gandhi, Ryan Gaines, and Brent Harrison. “A Hierarchical Approach for Visual Storytelling Using Image Description”, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2019).
Education
Ph.D., University of Kentucky