I am a senior staff research scientist and tech lead manager at Waymo. I received my PhD in Computer Science from UCLA where I was a member of the Automated Reasoning Group advised by Prof. Adnan Darwiche. My doctoral dissertation introduced decomposition techniques to learn probabilistic graphical models from data more efficiently. I was honored to receive the Northrop-Grumman Outstanding Research Award. Before UCLA, I visited LAAS-CNRS France where I enjoyed working with Dr. Pierre Emmanuel Hladik on stochastic analysis of real-time systems. Before that, I completed a Masters in computer engineering at Cairo University Egypt where I was extremely lucky to work with Prof. Amir Atiya. I was also a teaching assistant and a part-time research engineer at IBM.
Research Openings: Email me a copy of your resume or apply directly on waymo.com.
A new paper is accepted to International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).
July 2023Two new papers are accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
January 2023A new paper is accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
January 2022A new paper is accepted to NeurIPS, Deep RL Workshop 2021.
October 2021I am serving as a Senior PC member for IJCAI 2020.
September 2020I am serving as a PC member for AAAI 2020.
September 2020I filed 11 patents on self-driving cars.
September 2020A new paper is accepted to IROS 2019.
June 2019I served as a PC member for IJCAI 2019.
December 2018I gave a talk on self-driving cars at UCLA.
January 2018I am serving as a PC member for IJCAI 2018.
November 2017Waymo annouced the first self-driving fleet in the world: video.
November 2017I gave a talk on deep learning at UCLA.
November 2016A new paper is accepted for plenary presentation at UAI 2015.
May 2015I won the Northrop-Grumman Outstanding Research Award.
May 2015I defended my thesis.
April 2015A new paper is accepted to IJCAI 2015.
April 2015The slides of the ITA talk are now available here.
February 2015I gave a graduation day talk at ITA.
January 2015I am teaching cs32 this quarter.
January 2015A new paper is accepted to NIPS 2014.
September 2014I received a Student Ambassador honorarium from UCLA.
February 2014A new paper is accepted to NIPS 2013.
September 2013I received a masters from UCLA.
Jan 2013I am a winner of the first Procter & Gamble Graduate Seminar competition at UCLA.
November 2012A new paper is accepted to the Big Learning NIPS workshop 2012.
November 2012EDML was presented in SoCaML 2011.
September 2011A new paper is accepted to UAI 2011.
July 2011My research interests are in:
I am particularly interested in the design and analysis of highly efficient and accurate deep models which are trained using supervised, reinforcement or imitation learning. On the practical side, I focus on the development of efficient and theoretically sound reasoning algorithms that can work in real-time.