Intelligence is an emergent property of systems that learn. I'm interested in building those systems.
My work sits at the intersection of research and engineering—developing evaluation frameworks, training novel models, and building infrastructure that pushes the boundaries of what AI systems can understand and generate.
Research Interests
Reasoning & Model Evaluation
Developing frameworks to measure and improve how language models reason, decompose problems, and chain thoughts. Building synthetic data to teach models structured thinking.
Multilingual Evaluation & Cross-Lingual Transfer
Developing evaluation frameworks and transfer learning techniques that enable models to generalize across languages and cultural contexts.
Multimodal AI
Audio-based generative AI, cross-modal understanding, and developing datasets for under-explored modalities in state-of-the-art models.
Experience
Software Engineering Intern
Building synthetic reasoning chains to teach models how to think.
Software Engineering Intern
Teaching language models to extract structure from chaos.
Machine Learning Research Assistant
Probing what audio models really understand beyond transcription.
Machine Learning Research Assistant
Learning representations that transfer across linguistic boundaries.
Machine Learning Research Assistant
Teaching models to segment images without supervision or labels.
Publications
Separating Linguistic Relatedness from Task Learning in Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning
Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Ruochen Zhang, Alvin Grissom II.
The Illusion of Multilingual Reasoning: Evidence from Native Benchmarks in Under-Resourced Languages
Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Alvin Grissom II.
CuLEmo: Cultural Lenses on Emotion - Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding
Tadesse Destaw Belay, Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Alvin Grissom II, et al.
Navigating Dialectal Bias and Ethical Complexities in Levantine Arabic Hate Speech Detection
Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Rui-Jie Yew, Xerxes Minocher, Suresh Venkatasubramanian.