Waleed Ammar

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Waleed Ammar is the co-founder of a mission-driven AI startup and a product manager at the Allen Institute for Artificial intelligence (AI2). Before rejoining AI2 this year, Waleed was a senior research scientist at Google, where he helped develop transformer-based models for generating DNA sequences based on PacBio long-reads which significantly reduced variant-calling errors [Nature Biotech'22]. He also helped develop task-oriented dialog systems which are more robust to disfluencies, code-switching and user revisions [arXiv'23]. Prior to joining Google, Waleed led the Semantic Scholar research team's efforts to develop ML-based methods to facilitate access to the literature [e.g., NAACL 19], build a knowledge graph of the scientific literature [NAACL'18], and use this wealth of information to identify systemic social problems in science [JAMA'19]. He also occasionally teaches courses at UW linguistics as an affiliate faculty member. In 2016, Waleed received a Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University. Before pursuing the Ph.D., Waleed was a research engineer at Microsoft Research and a web developer at eSpace Technologies. Outside work, Waleed spends most of his time on the water or in dancing studios.