About

November 27, 2024

a picture of Boston’s Back Bay with the Charles River in the front

Thanks for stopping by!

My name is Ali, and I have 7+ years of experience in research, with a strong technical slant. I’ve built software and infrastructure to collect experimental data from users, and have worked extensively on statistical analysis of data. I am experienced at writing software, designing experiments, engineering data pipelines, analyzing data, building and iterating on machine learning models, and explaining results to diverse audiences.

Work

At Apple, I research methods and build evaluations to test upcoming AI/ML features for safety. At Oracle Labs, I worked with the ML Research Group on measuring gender and racial biases in BERT as a function of the model’s scale and pre-training data (arXiv). At Intel, I worked with AI and Analytics team to build the early version of an automated model card generator, and experimented with explainability methods for models on image and tabular data—the team later turned this work into a fantastic open souce Python toolkit.

Research

My PhD research measured the biased outcomes of machine learning systems used in online advertising. I studied Facebook’s advertising platform to uncover gender and racial biases in the delivery of job and housing ads; disparate pricing in the delivery of political ads; age and gender biases in the delivery of clickbait and deceptive ads.

This work was widely covered in the media (Vox, MIT Technology Review, WIRED), and I had the opportunity to brief staff at the U.S. House of Representatives about our results. Meta later agreed to fix racial biases in their housing ad delivery as part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice.

Personal

I live in Cambridge, MA, with my wife and daugther. Previously, I’ve lived in Saarbrücken, Germany—where I was a student at Saarland University, and a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. I am originally from Lahore, Pakistan. I am bilingual in Punjabi and Urdu, and speak just enough German to order a döner kebab. I enjoy reading, single player video games, tabla, and film photography.

Header: Boston’s Back Bay as seen from Longfellow Bridge, shot on Kodak Gold 200.