I'm a machine learning scientist at Apple, where I lead development of multi-modal foundation models for health. Beyond shipping models and features in production, we sometimes publish our work; here are a few selected publications: ICLR'24, arXiv'24, ICML'25, Nature Comms'25. My main research interest is deep representation learning, as well as a broad interest in all stages of developing general-purpose foundation models including pre-training & post-training. I have a deep passion for all things machine learning for time series and sequential data, on which I've spent most of my career. I believe in methods that generalize and scale, ie I am bitter lesson-pilled.
I was honored to rank 2nd in Iran's university entrance exam in 2010, and to get a chance to spend 2010-2015 in Sharif University of Technology majoring in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Economics, among a group of extremely talented and kind friends. After that, I moved to the USA in 2015 and I received my MSc in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in the artificial intelligence track, where I also got my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Maryam Shanechi in 2022. I had the privilege of working on sci-fi-esque projects related to brain-computer interfaces (think Black Mirror S1E3, S3E5, S4E2, S4E6, S7E1 & S7E4). My research focus during my PhD was developing unsupervised deep learning methods to improve brain-machine interfaces and to understand the brain. I developed latent variable models for characterizing multi-modal brain data, latent variable models of time series that enable flexible inference by combining neural networks and state space models, and artificial recurrent neural networks that recapitulate brain manifolds. In summer 2021, I was a machine learning intern at Apple, where I developed self-supervised deep learning models for wearable data; I rejoined in 2022 to continue the work, and it has been a fun ride ever since.
Outside work, most of my free time is spent working out, playing/watching soccer (fellow FPL/FIFA players, we can be good friends!), traveling, reading books, or of course tinkering with claude!
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