I’m co-founder of Verneek, a new deep-tech AI startup based in NYC with the mission of enabling anyone to make data-informed decisions. We are now hiring for various roles. It’s the best time to join us as we are putting together our core technical team. Apply here.
I work on building AI systems that can comprehend human language, in a deep manner, where they can show basic commonsense reasoning capabilities and “explain” themselves! I mainly model language in terms of ‘events‘ and their temporal and causal relations, through which we can build causal networks that predict what happens next! The applications of my work range from storytelling to vision & language.
I am an AI research scientist, working on building AI systems that can comprehend human language and show our basic common sense reasoning capabilities. I have been active in the AI startup community for the past few years and I am a big believer in the power of sustainable startups disrupting different sectors through AI, something that is harder to achieve in big tech companies. I was selected as a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science in 2019 for my work in AI.
I got my PhD at the Computer Science department of University of Rochester, with my thesis titled “From Event to Story Understanding”. At Rochester, I worked under James F. Allen in Conversational Interaction and Spoken Dialogue Research Group. During my PhD, I spent about a year at Microsoft Research working on various Vision & Language problems and one summer at Google NYC working on Sentiment Analysis.
After graduation, I joined BenevolentAI labs in NYC as a senior research scientist to use NLP and AI for accelerating scientific discovery for major diseases. After that, I worked at Elemental Cognition on building AI systems that not only comprehend stories, but also explain their reasoning and answer ‘why’.
Going down the memory lane, I got my bachelor’s degree from Sharif University of Technology in 2012 where I was a member of the NLP lab. I graduated from Farzanegan high school in 2008, during which I started working in NLP and also started our robotics team that got the 2nd place in the International Rescue Simulation League in the RoboCup 2006 competitions.