Summary
Bashar Alhafni is an Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing at MBZUAI with nine years of industry and research experience spanning grammatical error correction, machine translation, timeline extraction, and abstractive summarization. He completed a PhD at NYU after research roles at USC/ISI and internships at Grammarly and Dataminr, bringing a strong blend of academic rigor and applied NLP in production contexts. His work includes reinforcement learning for multilingual dictionary processing and contributing neural baselines for temporal relation extraction on narrative datasets, highlighting a focus on low-resource and temporal NLP challenges. Comfortable bridging research and engineering, he has experience shipping NLP features in industry settings and teaching large graduate cohorts, indicating both mentorship and product-oriented instincts. Based in Abu Dhabi, he pairs deep technical expertise with cross-cultural project experience across the US and UAE.
9 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Masters of Science Computer Science, Masters of Science Computer Science at University of Southern California
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at New York University
Bachelors of Science Computer Science Minor in Mathematics, Bachelors of Science Computer Science Minor in Mathematics at University of Bridgeport
English, Arabic, French