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Ziad Sakr

Research & education

Where the engineering was formalised

Three institutions, one thread: learning to hold a result to a standard before believing it.

  1. Boston University

    Dates to confirm

    Master's degree

    Graduate study, and the point where the machine learning work stopped being self-taught and became method.

  2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Dates to confirm

    Research experience

    Research conducted at MIT: technical research and experimentation, and the discipline of holding a result to a standard before believing it.

    Research experience at MIT — not an MIT degree program.

  3. Trinity College

    Dates to confirm

    Computer Science · Undergraduate study, alongside collegiate squash

    Studied Computer Science while competing for Trinity College, one of the most successful programmes in collegiate squash.

Research approach

Graduate study and research changed how I build, more than what I build.

Before it, my experimentation was intuition with a stopwatch: try something, see if it feels better, keep it. Research replaced that with a method — define the question precisely, build the measurement first, control what you can, and treat a promising result with suspicion until it survives a real test.

That habit is the single most transferable thing I took into industry. Most of the difference between an AI system that demos well and one that can be relied on is whether someone built the evaluation before they built the enthusiasm.

Note on accuracy: the MIT entry above describes research experience associated with MIT. It is not a degree from MIT, and is not described as one anywhere on this site.

Publications & talks

Nothing listed yet

Publications, preprints and talks will be listed here as they are confirmed. Nothing is listed that hasn't been.

Contact

Building something at the intersection of AI and the real world?

I'm glad to hear from engineers, founders, researchers, coaches and athletes — and from anyone working on AI systems that have to be right rather than merely impressive.