wammar@cs.cmu.edu
Carnegie Mellon University
School of Computer Science
Language Technologies Institute
5719 Gates-Hillman Complex
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
I'm a research assistant and Ph.D. student at Noah's ARK and clab research groups. My broad research interest is in natural language processing and machine learning, with an emphasis on statistical machine translation. My PhD advisors are Noah Smith and Chris Dyer. I'm working on the low-density machine translation project.
Before coming to CMU, I used to work for Microsoft Research (Redmond and Cairo labs) in the fields of NLP, IR and data mining. I received my Bachelor degree in Computer Systems and Engineering at Alexandria University on 2007.
02/2013: i'm reviewing for the 23rd international joint conference on artificial intelligence.
01/2013: i'm presenting a poster on classification of privacy policies at the data privacy day.
01/2013: i'm taing the spring semester's machine learning course.
12/2012: i'll be spending the summer with the nlp group at microsoft research.
Automatic Categorization of Privacy Policies [pdf]
Waleed Ammar, Shomir Wilson, Norman Sadeh, Noah Smith. Tech Report 2012.
Transliteration by Sequence Labeling with Lattice Encoding and Reranking [pdf]
Waleed Ammar, Chris Dyer, Noah Smith. NEWS workshop at ACL 2012.
Syntax-based Augmentation of Statistical Machine Translation Phrase Tables
Achraf Chalabi, Waleed Ammar, Mostafa Ashour. US Patent, Publication No. US 2012/0296633.
Improved Transliteration Mining Using Graph Reinforcement [pdf]
Ali El Kahki, Kareem Darwish, Ahmed Saad El Din, Mohamed Abd El-Wahab, Ahmed Hefny and Waleed Ammar. EMNLP 2011.
ICE-TEA: In-Context Expansion and Translation of English Abbreviations [pdf]
Waleed Ammar, Kareem Darwish, Ali ElKahki and Khaled Hafez. CICLING 2011.
User evaluation in a collaborative online forum
Nayer Wanas, Heba Ashour, Moustafa El-Baradei, Ahmed Morsy, Motaz El Saban and Waleed Ammar. US patent, Publication No. US 2010/0162135 A1.
Secure localization in wireless sensor networks: a survey [pdf]
Waleed Ammar, Ahmed ElDawy and Moustafa Youssef. arXiv 2010.
Automatic scoring of online discussion posts [pdf]
Nayer Wanas, Motaz El Saban, Heba Ashour and Waleed Ammar. CIKM 2008, 2nd WICOW workshop.
Microsoft Research – Redmond
Software Development Engineer II (Dec 2010 – Aug 2011)
Identified deficiencies of machine translated text and worked with researchers of the NLP group to find solutions. I was also responsible for integration of such solutions into the production system.
Microsoft Research – Microsoft Innovation Laboratory in Cairo
Research Software Development Engineer (Nov 2007 – Nov 2010)
Collaborated with researchers in MSR to push state of the art in the fields of Data Mining and Natural Language Processing by engineering prototype technologies, writing papers and formulating patents. I was also responsible for the transfer of research prototypes into Microsoft products.
Alexandria University
Teaching Assistant (Aug 2007 – Nov 2007)
Tutored students, held office hours, graded homework and mid-term exams, administrated tests and exams, and assisted professors with laboratory sessions.
Courses: Probability and Statistics I, Technical Writing I, and Introduction to Computers.
eSpace Technologies
Part-Time Software Developer (Jul 2007 – Nov 2007)
My role encompassed design and development of features in web portals as well as identification and resolution of deficiencies in web applications. I also took part in collecting customer requirements.
IBM Egypt – Cairo Technology Development Center
Intern at Human Language Technologies Group (Jul 2006 – Aug 2006)
Participated in TREC 2006 genomics track competition. We developed an information retrieval (IR) system capable of answering specific types of questions from within biological documents.
Procter & Gamble (P&G)
Intern on Project Management (Jun 2005 – Aug 2005)
Managed a real-world automation project at P&G powder factory in Egypt. Project scope included automatic identification of objects, semi-automatic acquisition of product type information, and rich web reporting system.
The R&D Sketch: Random thoughts/tips for juniors interested in Computer Science R&D