Bio

I am Khalil (🇺🇸, 🇲🇦), and I am an NLP & Generative AI Researcher, working as Principal Applied Scientist at Oracle, in Dr. Yassine Benajiba’s team.

I previously worked as Applied Research Scientist at Grammarly in Dr. Peng Wang’s Strategic Research team and in John Blatz’s Orchestration Agents team, and as Senior Research Scientist at TikTok ( Bytedance Research), mostly in Dr. Heng Wang’s team. Before that, I worked as AI Research Scientist at Meta.

I am also a regular speaker at international AI conferences and events. In 2024, I gave a tutorial about LLMs at the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Pan-African AI event, in Dakar; I was flown by the government of Morocco to speak at the 2nd International e-Health Forum in Casablanca; and I visited the UM6P Faculty of Medical Sciences to give a talk. I also participated in a live Q&A session at Rabat’s School of Information Sciences, and gave webinars since 2021 for MoroccoAI and Math&Maroc. I also co-organize the ArabicNLP Conference since 2023, and served as Area Chair for ACL and EMNLP.

Beyond my research, I am dedicated to increasing the visibility of North Africans in NLP and language technology. I co-founded North Africans in NLP, an affinity group for North African researchers in language technology. We have organized panels and social events at conferences such as EMNLP, COLING, EACL, NAACL, and ACL between 2020 and 2022. I am passionate about mentoring students and recent graduates in NLP research, aiming to democratize both NLP technology and research opportunities. I have co-authored papers with mentees that have been accepted at conferences like COLING and workshops like AfricaNLP at ICLR.

I obtained my Computer Science PhD degree at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 2022, where I was honored with the Doctoral Dissertation Award. During my PhD, I interned at various big tech companies:

My PhD research was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health through the National Institute on Aging, Adobe Research Gifts, and an Amazon Research Award (ARA) through a proposal I wrote for AWS AI titled: “Learning Representations for Voice-Based Conversational Agents for Older Adults” (see media coverage here: UC San Diego News, Tech Xplore, TekCrispy (en español), UCSD CSE News, UCSD Engineering News, UCSD Engineering on Twitter, UCSD Engineering on Facebook).

Prior to my PhD, I received my Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in 🇨🇭 Switzerland. I am grateful to have been a recipient of EPFL’s Academic Needs-based Scholarship, and the EPFL IC Department’s Master Research Scholarship. As part of my Bachelor’s, I spent a year on exchange at 🇸🇬 Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. I interned for a summer at Infosys in their Bangalore, 🇮🇳 India headquarters, and for a semester at the EPFL-based Digital Lab.