I earned a degree in IT Engineering from Damascus University in 2008, followed by a Master’s in machine learning and recommender systems from McGill University in 2011. My passion for AI began during my undergraduate years. I started my career as an NLP research engineer at Nuance (later acquired by Microsoft), where we built a Siri competitor for healthcare and automotive applications. In 2013, I pursued a PhD at the University of Montreal’s Mila lab, just as deep learning was transforming AI. Over five years, I witnessed breakthroughs like GANs and attention mechanisms while contributing to the field. After completing my PhD in 2018, I joined Element AI (later acquired by ServiceNow) as a researcher. In 2020, I moved to Facebook (Meta) as a research scientist, working on AI systems to detect unsafe content on Facebook and Instagram. In 2023, I contributed to MetaAI’s LLaMA models as part of the GenAI organization. Realizing the importance of both machine learning and software platforms in building top AI models, I joined Anyscale in 2024. As AI research lead, I focus on enhancing the Ray library, a distributed computing framework that powers AI solutions for major companies like OpenAI and Uber.