I am currently a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Beyond Limits working on cutting edge Generative AI: fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), benchmarking vector databases and improving Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Before that, I was a Machine Learning Researcher at Ericsson working on getting artificial intelligence to the latest advances in wireless telecommunication networks. Previously I spent some time at Besedo developing state-of-the-art machine learning solutions for automatic content moderation with the goal of making the internet a better and safer place. In September 2020, I obtained my PhD in Computer and Data Science at the IRIMAS of the Université Haute-Alsace. I worked on machine learning algorithms for time series classification with my brilliant supervisors: Germain Forestier, Jonathan Weber, Lhassane Idoumghar and Pierre-Alain Muller. I also hold an M.Sc. (2017) in Databases and Artificial Intelligence from the Université de Bourgogne - Dijon (France) and another M.Sc. (2017) in Software Engineering from the Université Antonine - Beirut (Lebanon). During my master thesis at Orange Labs - Sophia Antipolis (France) I developed a recommendation engine for a dataset exchange platform by combining machine learning and semantic web data. As for my final year engineering project TICKET Lab - Beirut (Lebanon) I worked on preserving data privacy using linear programming optimization techniques. During my PhD, I was the first instructor of the Deep Learning course at the engineering school ENSISA.

My research interests include Machine Learning, particularly Deep learning; Natural Language Processing; Computer Vision; Transformers techniques applied for content moderation problems.

CV (PDF) Publications (BibTex)

Publications

International Journals

International Conferences

International Workshops

National Conferences

National Workshops

Visiting researcher

• Monash One month visiting François Petitjean at Monash University and discussing time series classification and beyond (2019).
• Google One day visiting Neil Zeghidour at Google Brain and discussing deep learning for audio and time series data (2019).
• LIP6 One day visiting Jean-Yves at the Sorbonne University and discussing deep learning for time series representation learning (2019).
• Welten One day working with Daniele at the Welten Institute on leveraging artificial intelligence techniques for learning analytics (2019).
• CARES One day visiting Abhilash at the CARES Lab and discussing surgical data science and robotics (2018).

Teaching

• Deep Learning 20 hours for M.Sc. students in Computer Science.
• Web Programming 24 hours for engineering students in Computer Science.

Awards

• IEEE BigData'18 Student Travel Award for the IEEE International Conference on Big Data 2018 at Seattle, USA.
• UAPC'16 First place at the Université Antonine Programming Competition (UAPC) 2016 at Beirut, Lebanon.
• UAPC'15 Second place at the Université Antonine Programming Competition (UAPC) 2015 at Beirut, Lebanon.

Grants

• Mesocentre of Strasbourg 1.6 million GPU computing hours (2019) on the Strasbourg HPC.
• Mesocentre of Strasbourg 1.6 million GPU computing hours (2018) on the Strasbourg HPC.
• NVIDIA Corporation GPU Grant Quadro P6000 (2017).
• Coursera Financial Aid Deep Learning Speciality (2017).

Certifications

• MLAI'19 Attending the International Workshop on Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence (2019).
• PAISS'19 Attending the PRAIRIE Artificial Intelligence Summer School (2019).
• FDST'19 Attending the Learning from Data Streams and Time Series (2019).
• CARS'19 Attending the International Conference on Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (2019).
• IEEE BigData'18 Volunteering at the IEEE International Conference on Big Data (2018).
• DeepLearn'18 Attending the International Summer School on Deep Learning (2018).
• CISCO Completing the CISCO CCNA Routing & Switching (2017).
• LCPC'16 Participating at the Lebanese Collegiate Programming Contest (2016).
• Boot Camp Participating at the Advanced Programming & Algorithms Boot Camp (2016).
• LCPC'15 Participating at the Lebanese Collegiate Programming Contest (2015).

Service

Conference Comittees

• ORASIS'19 Francophone days of young researchers in computer vision 2019.
• EA'19 The 14th Biennial International Conference on Artificial Evolution 2019.

Workshop Committee

• AALTD'19 ECML/PKDD Workshop on Advanced Analytics & Learning on Temporal Data.
• OR'19 MICCAI Workshop on OR 2.0 Context-Aware Operating Theaters.

Reviewer

• ECAI European Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2020.
• NEUNET Neural Networks.
• IEEE TKDE IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering.
• IEEE JBHI IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.
• MICCAI International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention 2019.
• IEEE/CAA JAS IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.
• AIRE Artificial Intelligence Review.

Open Source Projects

• Keras.io The first Keras tutorial on deep learning for time series classification.
• sktime-dl An extension package for deep learning with Keras for sktime.