About

I am Khalil (, ), a PhD Student in the CSE NLP Group at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), working with Prof. Ndapa Nakashole.

I received my Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland. As part of my Bachelor’s, I spent a year on exchange at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. I interned for a summer at Infosys in their Bangalore, India headquarters, and for a semester at the EPFL-based Swisscom Digital Lab.

Research Interests

My research interests are in Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning. More precisely, I work on Generalization and Interpretability for Learned Text Embeddings. I want to develop interpretable neural models – with applications in document classification, parsing, etc. – and make them generalizable to a wider range of applications and environments.

PhD Timeline

2020

• July: Attending ACL 2020, online, thanks to a Diversity and Inclusion award.
• June: Excited to start a summer internship with Amazon Alexa! I visited their beautiful Seattle office in January, but due to COVID-19, this internship will be entirely remote.
• May: Check out our updated work with Adobe Research on the Label Attention Layer!
• April: Attending ICLR 2020, online, thanks to a Diversity and Inclusion award.
• March: Member of the ICML 2020 Program Committee.
• March: Patent with Adobe Research successfully filed for our Label Attention Layer!
• February: Member of the ACL 2020 Program Committee.
• February: “Voice-Based Conversational Agents for Older Adults”
  Paper with Janet, Ndapa, Nadir, Alison, Michael and Emilia accepted to the CHI 2020 Workshop “Conversational Agents for Health and Wellbeing” in Honolulu, HI.
• February: “Using HCI to Tackle Race and Gender Bias in ADHD Diagnosis”
  Paper with Naba accepted to the CHI 2020 Workshop “Engaging in Race in HCI” in Honolulu, HI.
• January: Excited to start collaborating on the NIH-funded VOLI research project!

2019

• November: Establishing a new State of the Art in Constituency and Dependency Parsing! Check out our work with Adobe Research.
• October: Thankful for a great experience at Adobe Research, and glad to continue the collaboration at UCSD!
• September: Participating with Adobe Research in the SoCal NLP Symposium in Los Angeles, CA.
• June: Excited to start a summer internship at Adobe Research in their San Jose HQ!
• June: Attending ICML 2019 in Long Beach, CA.
• May: Check out our live demo for our SwissText Chatbot!
• February: Check out our work on improving Document Classification using Tree-LSTMs!

2018

• September: Joining the UCSD NLP Group!