About

Thanks for stopping by! My name is Ali, and I have 7+ years of experience in research and engineering.

Work

At Amazon, I build data science tools to help internal auditors measure risk across Amazon’s diverse businesses. At Apple, I built datasets and ran 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 ML model explainability and fairness tools—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 Seattle, WA, with my wife and daugther. Previously, I’ve lived in Boston, MA—where I was a part of Khoury College; Saarbrücken, Germany—where I was a student at Saarland University, and a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems; and Lahore, Pakistan, where I am originally from.

I am bilingual in Punjabi and Urdu, and speak just enough German to order a döner kebab. In the rare free time I have, 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.

Last updated: November 16, 2025