Career
Experience
Academic research, university teaching, industry R&D, and strategic AI collaborations spanning multilingual NLP, speech, Arabic language technology, and large-scale model development.
15+ yearsresearch, teaching, and applied R&D
Academic + Industryresearch, teaching, and production-facing AI
Multilingual & Low-Resource AIArabic & African languages · NLP, speech, evaluation, and scalable systems
Academic appointments
Research leadership and university teaching across multilingual NLP, speech, and AI systems.
Nov. 2024 – Present
Research Associate
School of Information · University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada
- Lead and contribute to applied research in multilingual NLP, speech, and foundation-model evaluation, with focus on African and Arabic languages.
- Design benchmarks and evaluation platforms for text, speech, and LLMs.
- Coordinate multi-institutional research and mentor graduate researchers and engineers.
- Support large-scale research infrastructure involving UBC ARC, the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, cloud resources, and external partners.
Oct. 2019 – Oct. 2024
Postdoctoral Researcher
School of Information · University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada
- Developed foundation models and multilingual systems including ARBERT, MARBERT, AraT5, Cheetah, Serengeti, and Toucan.
- Processed billion-scale multilingual corpora with Python and PySpark and trained large models on TPU/GPU infrastructure.
- Created reusable benchmarks and tools including ORCA, Dolphin, TURJUMAN, and Octopus.
- Mentored undergraduate, MSc, and PhD students and research engineers while collaborating with international academic and industry partners.
Sep. 2011 – Aug. 2019
Lecturer
Applied College · Jazan University
Jazan, Saudi Arabia
- Instructor of record for databases, advanced databases, data structures, object-oriented programming, web programming, programming languages, and Python.
- Mentored undergraduate capstone projects and contributed to curriculum development and academic planning.
- Supported accreditation, teaching schedules, assessment design, grading rubrics, and instructional quality assurance.
Industry & applied R&D
Hands-on product and research roles in Arabic NLP, information retrieval, data mining, and production language technology.
Sep. 2011 – Sep. 2013
Senior NLP Consultant
Research and Development International (RDI)
Cairo, Egypt
- Provided NLP expertise for Arabic search, data mining, morphological processing, and POS-tagging systems.
- Worked with cross-functional research and engineering teams to develop and optimize commercial Arabic language technology.
May 2008 – Aug. 2011
Senior NLP Researcher
Research and Development International (RDI)
Cairo, Egypt
- Developed Arabic NLP applications including search, diacritization, morphological analysis, and POS tagging for production systems.
- Designed evaluation datasets and benchmarking methods and contributed to R&D publications and patent-related work.
Jan. 2008 – Apr. 2009
Technical Manager · Akhbar El-Yom Portal Project
Centre for Studies & Development of Computer & Information Systems
Cairo, Egypt
- Directed design and deployment of the Akhbar El-Yom news portal, coordinating engineers and designers and integrating Arabic content-management and search components.
Jan. 2008 – Apr. 2008
Research Engineer · e-Evaluation & Assessment Project
Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC)
Smart Village, Egypt
- Developed an evaluation platform for university graduation projects, streamlining project submission and assessment workflows.
Jun. 2006 – Jun. 2008
NLP Research Engineer
Centre of Excellence for Data Mining & Computer Modeling (DMCM)
Cairo, Egypt
- Developed Arabic news topic-tracking and event-detection pipelines combining information retrieval and statistical machine learning.
Selected strategic collaborations
Applied AI collaborations translating research expertise into real operational systems and broader language-technology impact.
Applied AI collaboration
Acumen Media Intelligence
Arabic OCR and Speech AI
- Led development of an in-house Arabic ASR solution that replaced a third-party MSA transcription subscription costing approximately US $2K per month.
- Extended speech support to Egyptian, Saudi, Emirati, and other Arabic varieties.
- Built an automated Arabic OCR pipeline for newspapers from multiple Arab countries, replacing manual extraction workflows.
Research collaboration
CLEAR Global / Gates Foundation-Supported Initiative
African Language AI · Text and Speech
- Contributed to benchmarking foundation models across African languages for both text and speech.
- Developed evaluation resources and speech-technology research supporting scalable, inclusive African language AI and multi-institutional collaboration.