Ahmed H. Awadallah

About Ahmed H. Awadallah

I lead multidisciplinary teams of researchers, applied scientists and engineers working at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. My current work focuses on making large-scale AI models more efficient in terms of (1) computational needs and (2) the amounts of supervision needed to learn to perform a new task. Our work spans both research and engineering where we advance the state-of-the-art and create horizontal technology that enables teams of scientists and developers to use large-scale AI in practice. My early work spanned topics including information extraction, summarization, measuring and improving search systems via user behavior modeling and building natural language interfaces to services and data. I co-authored a 100+ peer-reviewed publications in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval and I am a co-inventor on 40+ US patents. I regularly serves as (senior) committee, area chair, guest editor and editorial board member at many major NLP and IR conferences and journals. My contributions to NLP and IR have been recently recognized with the 2020 Karen Spärck Jones Award from the British Computer Society.

Experience

1. Senior Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research

   Microsoft

   Jan 2017 — Present · Redmond, WA, US

   I work with both research and engineering teams to advance the state-of-the-art and create horizontal technology that enables teams of scientists and developers to use large-scale AI in practice. Our current focus is on making large-scale AI models more efficient in terms of (1) computational needs and (2) the amounts of supervision needed to learn to perform a new task.

Education

• Cairo University

  B.Sc, Computer Engineering

  1998 — 2003

• Cairo University

  M.Sc, Computer Engineering

  2004 — 2007

• University of Michigan

  Ph.D, Computer Science and Engineering

  2007 — 2011