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
- December: Our team at
TikTok is releasing Fast Prompt Alignment for Text-to-Image Generation, including the open-source codebase on TikTok’s Github!
- November: Invited as the first guest of “Atay m3a CODE” (Darija for “Tea with CODE”) at Rabat’s School of Information Sciences (ESI)!
- October: Invited Panelist at the 2nd International e-Health Forum in Casablanca,
Morocco! This forum is under the High Patronage of His Majesty King Mohammed VI of Morocco, and co-organized by the Mohammed VI Foundation for Sciences and Health, in partnership with the Moroccan Government Ministries of Health, Foreign Affairs, Higher Education, and Digital Transition.
- September: My sincere thanks to Prof. Tariq Daouda and his AI & Bioinformatics lab, as well as Prof. Rachid El Fatimy, Dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, for hosting me for a talk at UM6P in Ben Guerir,
Morocco!
- September: Excited to be a Tutorial Speaker on LLMs at the 2024 Deep Learning Indaba in Dakar,
Senegal! I will also be co-organizing the Workshop on LLMs for Low-Resource Languages.
- June: Invited to serve as Industry Track Area Chair for EMNLP 2024!
- April: Invited Talk on April 24th at the workshop on Generative AI in the era of LLMs held at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and its Applications in the Age of Digital Transformation (I2COMSAPP), organized by the Faculty of Sciences and Techniques at Nouakchott University in
Mauritania.
- February: Invited to serve as Area Chair for ACL 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.