A.R.
View from the summit of Mont Tremblant: forest, lakes, and a low winter sun.

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Ammar
Rashed

I take things apart until the signal shows: systems, data, and the sentence someone didn't quite say.

Hold still and the picture clears. Ironically, I used to measure that for a living.

01

Readings, surface & latent

Every fact has a layer underneath. Hover with the lantern, tap on a phone, or tab through.

02

Dissection

My one trick: take anything apart until its pieces make sense. A system, a dashboard, or something said at dinner.

Specimen A · heard at home
“You love work, you don’t love me.”
  1. LiteralA complaint about work.
  2. Between the lines“I miss you.”
  3. FeelingLonely, and not sure she still comes first.
  4. FixClose the laptop. The bug will still be there tomorrow.
Specimen B · heard in a meeting
“Can we make this dashboard prettier?”
  1. LiteralColours, fonts, spacing.
  2. Between the lines“I can’t find the number I need.”
  3. ComponentsOne question per chart. One decision per question.
  4. FixAnswer the question first. Pretty comes free.
Specimen C · heard in AI
“The model is 99% accurate.”
  1. LiteralOn average, over a test set, it's right.
  2. Missing pieceHow wrong is it this time?
  3. ComponentsA prediction, plus its own error estimate.
  4. FixEvery reading gets its own error bar. (I wrote a paper on it.)
Specimen D · heard everywhere
“AI is too expensive.”
  1. DemandScattered across thousands of teams. Pool it.
  2. SupplyData centres that could compete, but don't. Let them.
  3. WasteCapacity people paid for and never used. Put it to work.
  4. ResultCheaper Inference, built with a team I'm lucky to be part of.
03

Trajectory, 8,770 km

From a small town in the Nile Delta to the coldest capital in the world. Scroll and each place comes into focus.

no photograph
31.21° N, 31.36° E · 1996–2014

BilqasEgypt

Where I was born and learned to ask why. Full marks in physics, strong opinions on everything. Some places you carry at a resolution no camera has.

Istanbul at night from a plane window: rivers of orange street light.
41.02° N, 29.02° E · 2014

IstanbulÜsküdar, Kartal, Eyüp

Seventeen, a scholarship, and fifteen million lights. Computer science, taught by people who also made me read philosophy, sociology and history. It worked.

A calm Aegean bay in Muğla, rocks in the foreground, hills on the horizon.
37.22° N, 28.36° E · 2017

MuğlaTürkiye

Three papers as an undergraduate on serious games for children, a research tour from Brussels to Ljubljana, and a new passport. Still the kid asking why.

Doha's coastline lit up at night, seen from a descending plane.
25.29° N, 51.53° E · 2019

DohaQatar

My first international conference, as a volunteer. I flew home with a research collaboration and an idea, sentence embeddings plus a humble SVM, that later took first place in a shared task.

A clear turquoise river in Antalya, framed by pine trees and a white boulder.
36.90° N, 30.70° E · 2020

AntalyaTürkiye

MSc done, first-author paper at ICWSM. Water this clear makes you suspicious of every blurry thing you were ever told.

Hot-air balloons over the snow-dusted rock valleys of Cappadocia.
38.64° N, 34.83° E · January 2021

KapadokyaTürkiye

My last winter in Türkiye. Two months later, a one-way flight to Ottawa and a PhD.

The Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, Ottawa, under a pale spring sky.
45.42° N, 75.70° W · 2021

OttawaCanada

The coldest capital in the world. People tell me that like it's a complaint.

Niagara Falls through the trees, a rainbow in the mist.
43.08° N, 79.07° W · 2023

NiagaraOntario

All that water, all that roar, and still a rainbow in the spray. Signal survives noise.

Champlain Lookout in Gatineau Park: autumn forest falling away to farmland and the Ottawa River.
45.51° N, 75.89° W · most weekends

Gatineau ParkChamplain Lookout

Twenty minutes from home, the world gets big and I get to be the right size.

The Atlantic at Casablanca: pale sky, a band of white surf, wet sand.
33.57° N, 7.59° W · 8 August 2025

CasablancaMorocco

I defended my PhD from here, remotely, with the Atlantic just out of frame. Four journals, one conference, and a committee that smiled.

A stone breakwater at Britannia Beach, Ottawa, running into the river under a dramatic sky.
45.36° N, 75.80° W · now

Ottawa, againBritannia Beach

Hiking in summer, snow in winter, data science in between. 8,770 km from Bilqas, before thirty, and somehow still the same kid.

04

Latent space

My life embedded, projected and clustered with the same method as my stance-detection paper (UMAP, then HDBSCAN). Hover a point to read it.

05

Instrument readings

A measurement without its uncertainty is just an opinion.

Citations
536

Google Scholar, November 2026. h-index 8.

Languages
3.25±0.25

العربية, English, Türkçe, et un peu de français.

Countries called home
3±0

Egypt, Türkiye, Canada.

Ottawa winters
5

Enjoyed: 5 ± 0.

Favourite dish
Mahshi

Warak enab, p < 0.01. İskender and Nashville hot chicken still under review.

Soulslike deaths
∞

Instrument saturated. Results not reported.

06

Work, in public

Research that passed review, and code you can read.

Since September 2025

Head of Data Science, Keak

Keak runs conversion experiments on websites by itself. I lead the data science behind it: generating variants, sequential statistics that call winners honestly, and feedback loops that make every test teach the next one.

Cheaper Inference is how we push the price of AI down: one API, hundreds of models, never above list price. Built by a team that makes hard things look easy.

Before: ML engineering, an SME-lending bank, a computer-vision system that graded pizza for 20+ restaurants, and four years of consulting and teaching.

  • 2026Real-Time Prediction of Player Engagement from Multimodal DataIEEE Transactions on Multimedia · first authornew
  • 2025A Review of Player Engagement Estimation in Video GamesACM TOMM · first author34 cit.
  • 2025Real-Time Player Engagement Measurement Using Nonintrusive Game TelemetryIEEE OJIM · first author13 cit.
  • 2025MultiPENG: a Multimodal Dataset for Player Engagement (EEG, eye tracking, webcam)IEEE Data Descriptions · first author16 cit.
  • 2022A Novel Method to Estimate Measurement Error in AI-Assisted MeasurementsIEEE I2MTC · first author8 cit.
  • 2021Embeddings-Based Clustering for Target Specific Stances: The Case of a Polarized TurkeyICWSM (AAAI) · first author84 cit.
  • 2021Arabic Offensive Language on Twitter: Analysis and ExperimentsWANLP @ ACL227 cit.
  • 2020ALT Submission for the OSACT Shared Task on Offensive Language DetectionOSACT · 1st place, subtask A57 cit.
  • 2017A Serious Game for Children with Speech Disorders and Hearing ProblemsIEEE SeGAH · undergraduate75 cit.

All 14 on Google Scholar →

Code

  • UnsupervisedStanceDetection

    Tweets → sentence embeddings → UMAP → HDBSCAN. 90% precision, zero labels. The method behind the map above.

  • EventOrient

    My BSc graduation project: a university's social network, crawled, clustered and told as a story over time.

  • Genobolitics

    Gene expression → metabolic flux → disease classification. Undergrad bioinformatics, with linear programs built on the fly.

  • Hierarchical-Bayesian-Regression

    Pooled vs separate vs hierarchical Bayes for blood pressure, in Julia. A lesson in honest uncertainty.

وَعَلَّمَكَ مَا لَمْ تَكُن تَعْلَمُ ۚ وَكَانَ فَضْلُ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكَ عَظِيمًا

“And He taught you that which you did not know. And ever has the favour of Allah upon you been great.”

Qur’an 4:113

  1. Do not put your faith in plans. Plan, and have faith.
  2. Humility and self-esteem go together. Neither idolize nor belittle.
  3. Learn to teach, and teach to learn.
  4. Principles make up your spine. Bend, and you bend.
  5. The shorter the encounter, the more your mark can stand out.
  6. Everything has a story. Everyone is a story.
  7. Knowledge is like shawarma. Saj or pita, too oily or 90% salad, it's still shawarma.

Say salam.

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د. م. عمار Written on my bedroom door in Bilqas, years before it was true: Doctor, Engineer. The م was so nobody would ask me about their rash. Signed off by the University of Ottawa in 2025.