I am a research scientist at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab (IBM Research) working on AI agents as part of the AI Foundations Models team. I am also a research affiliate at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) (based at the MIT Media Lab). Before that, I was a reseach scientist (and before that postdoc) at MIT working with Prof. Deb Roy at CCC and the Media Lab.
I received my PhD in Computer Science in 2022 from McGill University where I was advised by Prof. Jackie Cheung. I was part of the Reasoning & Learning Lab and the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila). My PhD research was at the intersection of computational pragmatics and natural language generation and natural language understanding. My work focused on the computational modeling of presupposition effects in natural language and was recognized with the ACL 2018 Best Paper Award and COLING 2022 Best Short Paper Award.
Prior to my PhD, I received a Masters in Machine Learning & Statistical Signal Processing from McGill in 2014 and a Bachelors in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2011.
