About

Bio

I am an NLP & Generative AI researcher and Principal Applied Scientist at Oracle, in Dr. Yassine Benajiba's team. My work spans large language models and the AI agents built on them, from evaluating and aligning generative AI to making it work for underrepresented languages.

Experience

Principal Applied Scientist2025–present
Oracle
In Dr. Yassine Benajiba's team, researching LLMs and language technology for underrepresented areas.
Applied Research Scientist2025
Grammarly
In Dr. Peng Wang's Strategic Research team and John Blatz's Orchestration Agents team.
Senior Research Scientist2023–2024
TikTok · ByteDance Research
Mostly in Dr. Heng Wang's team, working on text-to-image generation and multi-modal LLM evaluation.
AI Research Scientist2022–2023
Meta
Working on entity linking and language understanding (then Facebook AI).

PhD internships

Four summers across big-tech research labs while at UC San Diego.

Adobe Research
Summer 2019
Developed a state-of-the-art parser and the Label Attention Layer.
Amazon Alexa
Summer 2020
Reinforcement learning for controllable abstractive summarization.
Meta AI
Summer 2021
Entity linking for consumer health text data (then Facebook AI).
Google Brain
Fall 2021
Task-oriented dialog systems with rewards (now Google DeepMind).

Education

2022
Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
★ Doctoral Dissertation Award
2018
Master's & Bachelor's in Computer Science
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 🇨🇭 Switzerland
★ Academic Needs-based & IC Master Research Scholarships
2016
Exchange Year (Bachelor)
Nanyang Technological University, 🇸🇬 Singapore
Funding & awards

My PhD research was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Aging), Adobe Research Gifts, and an Amazon Research Award for the proposal “Learning Representations for Voice-Based Conversational Agents for Older Adults.” The work was covered by UC San Diego News and Tech Xplore.

Personal

I was born and raised in Marrakech, Morocco, a truly wonderful and lively city. I speak five languages; please feel free to reach out in any of them.

Moroccan Darija Français العربية English Español
Countries & territories visited
43
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Click on any country to zoom in. Hover over countries to see if I've visited them.

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