CV
Research Statement
My work lies at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing with a focus on multimodal learning and vision-language models, including vision-language understanding & reasoning, cross-modal retrieval, and structured information extraction. This research has led to publications at top-tier venues such as CVPR 2026 & ACL 2025.
Education
Virginia Tech Jan 2023 – Jan 2028 (Expected)
Ph.D. Computer Science
Advisor: Dr. Chris Thomas | GPA: 4.00/4.00
Advisor: Dr. Chris Thomas | GPA: 4.00/4.00
Jordan University of Science and Technology Feb 2020 – Jun 2022
M.S. Data Science
Advisor: Prof. Rehab Duwairi | GPA: 4.26/4.30
Advisor: Prof. Rehab Duwairi | GPA: 4.26/4.30
Jordan University of Science and Technology Feb 2016 – Jan 2020
B.S. Computer Science
Advisor: Dr. Malak Abdullah | GPA: 4.04/4.20 (Ranked 1st of 62)
Advisor: Dr. Malak Abdullah | GPA: 4.04/4.20 (Ranked 1st of 62)
Publications
See the publications page for the complete list and links.
Research Experience
Research Assistant | Virginia Tech Mar 2023 – Present
- Led diversity-aware image-text retrieval using maximal matching objectives and multi-embedding strategies, improving performance by up to 7.1% and resulting in an ACL 2025 publication.
- Built a diversification pipeline that generates facet-specific captions with vision-language models, expanding beyond COCO and Flickr30k coverage.
- Leading generative room-geometry work that conditions on room-impulse responses (RIRs) to reconstruct layouts from line-segment representations.
- Collaborated with Columbia University on ENTER and JourneyBench, contributing modeling, annotation, and evaluation for NeurIPS 2024 publications.
- Supported hospital deployment of a real-time, multi-view surgical instrument classifier covering 95 instrument types with high accuracy and SUS 81.7.
Research Assistant | Jordan University of Science and Technology Feb 2020 – Nov 2022
- Created So2al-wa-Gwab, a 10K-question Arabic QA dataset with scripted scraping, annotation workflow design, and three-stage quality control.
- Benchmarked span-extraction models across seven Arabic QA datasets using EM and F1, demonstrating transformer gains over baselines.
- Led an Arabic humor detection project with end-to-end NLP pipelines and ranked 7/45 (top ~15%) in shared-task competition results.
- Conducted a systematic literature review on Arabic QA extraction to highlight translation dependencies and inform dataset design.
Research Assistant (Intern) | Jordan University of Science and Technology Jun 2019 – Aug 2019
- Built and debugged deep learning pipelines with TensorFlow and spaCy for propaganda and emotion detection, ranking 7/26 (top 27%) in the NLP4IF 2019 SLC track.
Academic Contributions
Graduate Teaching Assistant
- CS4804 Intro to AI (Spring 2025)
- CS5914 AI Tools in Software Development (Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024)
- CS1064 Intro to Programming in Python (Summer I 2023, Summer I 2024)
- CS5824/ECE5424 Advanced Machine Learning (Spring 2023)
Reviewer
- WACV 2024
- ACL Rolling Review (Feb 2025, May 2025)
Honors & Awards
Sanghani Center Travel Fund ($750) – Virginia Tech (2025)
CS Department Travel Fund ($750) – Virginia Tech (2025)
GPSS Travel Fund Grant ($500) – Virginia Tech Graduate School (2025)
Outstanding Graduate Student Award – Full scholarship for M.S., JUST (2020-2022)
Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award – Ranked 1st of 62, multiple Honors List mentions (2020)
Conferences & Presentations
ACL 2025 Jul 2025 | Vienna, Austria
63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Poster: "Maximal Matching Matters: Preventing Representation Collapse for Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval."
Poster: "Maximal Matching Matters: Preventing Representation Collapse for Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval."
Technical Skills
Languages & Programming
ML / Data
Systems / Tools
Spoken Languages
English (Fluent) • Arabic (Native)