Updates from Dr. Khalil خليل ⵅⴰⵍⵉⵍ

I am Khalil (, ), and I am an NLP & Generative AI Researcher, working as Applied Research Scientist at Grammarly.

My research aims to democratize LLMs & language technology and explore their applications in user-generated content and underrepresented areas. I hold a PhD from UC San Diego, where I earned the Doctoral Dissertation Award and an Amazon Research Award, and previously worked as Senior Research Scientist at TikTok ( Bytedance) and as AI Research Scientist at Meta. My journey includes impactful internships at Google Brain (now merged into Google Deepmind), Amazon Alexa, Adobe Research, and Meta (then-known as Facebook AI), tackling challenges in parsing, summarization, entity linking, and dialog systems. Beyond research, I’m passionate about sharing knowledge through talks, mentorship, and organizing and speaking at global AI events.

News

2025

  • January: Excited to join Grammarly as Applied Research Scientist!

2024

2023

  • December: Invited Lecture on Transformers at the Math & Maroc webinar! Watch it here.
  • December: Invited to serve as Area Chair for NAACL 2024!
  • December: Attending EMNLP 2023 in Singapore. Come check out our ArabicNLP Conference!
  • November: Our team at TikTok releases InfiMM-Eval, a benchmark for Complex Open-Ended Reasoning evaluation for Multi-modal LLMs!
  • July: Overjoyed to join TikTok ( Bytedance Research) as Senior Research Scientist!
  • July: Invited Lecture on Transformers at the AI Summer School held at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (AUI), Morocco, and organized by AUI and MoroccoAI.
  • June: Received the UCSD CSE Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2022 in person in San Diego!
  • June: Invited Research Talks at TikTok, Spotify, and Apple.
  • May: Invited Research Talks at Toyota Research Institute, and Tencent AI Lab.
  • May: Served on the Master’s Thesis Committee for Aiman Belmokhtar (University of Miami) on Moroccan Darija text-to-speech models.
  • April: Invited to be part of the organizing committee of the First Arabic NLP Conference (WANLP 2023), co-located with EMNLP 2023!

2022

  • December: Honored to receive the UCSD CSE Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2022!
  • October: 1 shared task paper accepted at WANLP 2022 with my mentee Ahmed!
  • August: 1 paper accepted at COLING 2022 with my mentee Harpreet! This work is the last chapter of my doctoral dissertation.
  • July: We are organizing an affinity group workshop at NeurIPS 2022 for North Africans in ML!
  • June: Call me Dr. Mrini – I have graduated! Beyond excited to join Meta as AI Research Scientist!
  • May: Excited to head to ACL 2022! See you in Dublin, Ireland!
  • March: Paper with my mentee Abderrahmane on Moroccan Darija summarization accepted at the AfricaNLP workshop at ICLR 2022!
  • February: 2/2 papers accepted to ACL 2022, including my internship project at Facebook AI!

All opinions shared online are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer.