Ibrahim Sharaf

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Hi! I am an engineer and researcher working in natural language processing. Currently, I am a staff machine learning engineer at Cision (following the acquistion of Factmata), working on online content understanding and combating misinformation and harmful content.

I have 7+ years of experience working in the industry. Prior to Factmata, I worked at Mawdoo3 (the world's most visited Arabic website and MENA's #1 digital platform), K2 Integrity (AI for Cyber Defense), Yaoota (MENA's premier shopping engine), and Microsoft Research Lab in Cairo (Bing).

I collaborate with NLPnorth research unit at IT University of Copenhagen, under the supervision of Prof Barbara Plank, and co-authored a couple of papers published at EACL & NAACL 2021.

[Oct 2022] Factmata is acquired by Cision, covered in TechCrunch!

[Aug 2022] Attended the Deep Learning Indaba at Tunis.

[Apr 2022] Admitted into the Computational Linguistics master's program at the University of Washington!

[June 2021] Got accepted into multiple summer schools: 11th Lisbon Machine Learning, Mexican NLP, and PRAIRIE/MIAI.

[Jan 2021] Started working at Factmata, a London-based AI startup trying to solve Fake News.

[Aug 2020] Invited by Prof Yasmine Afify to deliver an introductory Artificial Intelligence lecture at the Faculty of Computer Science, Ain Shams University. ( Slides| Arabic Recording)

[July 2020] Organized a meetup for low resource NLP enthusiasts during ACL 2020, joined by 50+ researchers. ( meeting notes)

[Feb 2020] Invited by Prof Yasmine Afify to deliver Natural Language Processing: Past, Present, and Future lecture at the Faculty of Computer Science, Ain Shams University. ( Slides)

[Sep 2019] My Introduction to Natural Language Processing blog is now published on KDnuggets & Towards Data Science; It has been recognized by Prof Emily Bender!

[June 2019] Joined Mawdoo3 as a data scientist to work on Arabic natural language processing & understanding (NLP/NLU).

[Jan 2019] Mathematics for Data Science, a new blog published on Towards Data Science. It has a whopping ~200,000 views!

Rob van der Goot, Ibrahim Sharaf, Aizhan Imankulova, Ahmet Üstün, Marija Stepanović, Alan Ramponi, Siti Oryza Khairunnisa, Mamoru Komachi and Barbara Plank. 2021. From Masked Language Modeling to Translation: Non-English Auxiliary Tasks Improve Zero-shot Spoken Language Understanding. In NAACL. (paper|poster|slides|video|code|bib|tex)

Rob van der Goot, Ahmet Üstün, Alan Ramponi, Ibrahim Sharaf, and Barbara Plank. 2021. Massive Choice, Ample Tasks (MaChAmp): A Toolkit for Multi-task Learning in NLP. In EACL. (paper|poster|slides|code|video|website|bib|tex) Outstanding demo paper award!