Ammar عمار

Ammar عمار

Machine Learning Engineer

University of Edinburgh

Biography

I’m an AI and machine learning engineer with a passion for driving real-world impact through responsible innovation. NLP and efficient large language models are my specialties – I love democratizing software creation through my work. I’m currently pursuing a MSc in AI, researching efficient fine-tuning of transformers for code generation. In my roles so far, I’ve applied ML to agriculture, NLP, and software engineering challenges. Outside of work, I’m fascinated by the societal implications of AI and actively explore issues like algorithmic bias and responsible ML. I love connecting with fellow researchers pushing the boundaries of AI for good. When I’m not coding, you can find me in the cinema or on the football pitch. I’m always eager to take on new challenges and collaborate with thoughtful teams to advance the equitable use of AI.

Interests
  • Multi-Modal Machine Learning
  • Multilingual NLP
  • Responsible AI
  • Geospatial Analysis
Education
  • MSc in Artificial Intelligence, 2022

    University of Edinburgh

  • BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Software Engineering, 2014

    University of Khartoum

Skills

Python

90%

Statistics

100%

Photography

10%

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Clingendael - the Netherlands Institute of International Relations
NLP Consultant
October 2023 – Present Remote
 
 
 
 
 
School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh
Teaching Assistant
January 2023 – June 2023 Edinburgh, UK
 
 
 
 
 
Data Scientist
July 2021 – September 2022 Khartoum, Sudan
 
 
 
 
 
Full Stack Developer
December 2020 – June 2021 Khartoum, Sudan

Projects

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Knowledge-Based QA System
The system utilizes state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques like BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to understand the user’s question and find the best matching question-answer pair. Fine-tuning BERT on domain-specific data allows the system to become adept at understanding queries in a particular domain.
Knowledge-Based QA System
Multilingual Image Captioning
Used Pretrained CLIP image encoder and GPT-2 Language Model to build a multilingual image captioning system on English, Arabic, French, and Deutsch. The system was trained on 1.5M images and 4.5M captions from the Multi30K dataset, with 4 prefix adapters each on a specific language. The system was able to generate captions in the four languages with high accuracy.
Multilingual Image Captioning
Scaling Down Multi-Lingual Code Language Models
This project fine-tuned compact monolingual code language models to new programming languages using efficient techniques, with the goal of expanding capabilities and accessibility of code intelligence tools. The work shares insights from optimizing training efficiency and makes models/datasets publicly available to further AI democratization.
Scaling Down Multi-Lingual Code Language Models
Crop Monitoring
An Open-Source project for monitoring field health and growth stage development. I used real-time Sentinel-2 imagery, Python, Streamlit, GeoPandas, and JavaScript to create a web app demo to showcase the product. The web app takes a GeoJSON file as input and returns a map with the field boundaries and the NDVI, LAI, and True Color images for each field.
Crop Monitoring
Estimating Cultivated Lands Using Satellite based Land Cover Classification
This study aims to bridge this research gap through the development of a robust methodology that leverages remote sensing imagery and machine learning classification. We present a comprehensive model, which we employed to derive estimates of cultivated agricultural land in Gezira state, spanning the timeframe from 2019 to 2023.
Estimating Cultivated Lands Using  Satellite based Land Cover Classification

Contact

Send me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.