Hamid Reza Firoozfar

About me!

I’m Hamid Reza Firoozfar, a Ph.D. candidate in Operations and Information Systems at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, advised by Prof. Paul Jen-Hwa Hu. Before pursuing my Ph.D., I earned an MBA from the University of Tehran and a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology. I study how AI systems interpret human behavior and how people adapt when those systems shape what they can say and do.

My dissertation, Governing Beneath the Surface, examines three connected challenges: recognizing meaning concealed in coded language, understanding why people circumvent AI safeguards, and designing human oversight of AI agents. These projects address a shared question: how can we govern AI-mediated environments when the behavior we observe does not tell the whole story? My goal is to develop systems that respond to context and intent while preserving legitimate expression and meaningful human control.

I combine computational methods with empirical research to investigate these questions and build tools to address them. My work draws on natural language processing, machine learning, large language models, and experimental and causal approaches. I also study healthcare information systems, with an emphasis on making predictive models useful and interpretable for clinical decision-making. My recent research has been accepted at EMNLP and Decision Support Systems.