I am an AI Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar. I am also a Co-founder and Co-director at MenaML, the Middle East and North Africa Machine Learning Winter School — a UK-registered NGO that brings together students, researchers, and leading scientists from across MENA and the world to build a thriving ML community in the region.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021, advised by Prof. Alexander G. Schwing. Before that, I earned an M.S. from Virginia Tech and an M.S. and B.S. from the Technical University of Munich, and spent one year as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

My research is centred around Bayesian machine learning — including variational inference, sampling, and energy-based models — as well as reinforcement learning, and is inspired by applications in healthcare and computer vision.

News

• New — Check RoBee story and subscribe to waiting list for app launch.
• May 2026 — Our paper Particles Don’t Care About Z: Towards Scaling Entropy Estimation of Unnormalized Densities is accepted at ICML 2026.
• January 2026 — The 2nd edition of MenaML at KAUST was a huge success. Read the coverage by Arab News.
• December 2025 — Sakina.AI has received the QRDI Innolight grant (role: advisor).