Fuad Issa
Verified Expert in Engineering
Machine Learning Developer
London, United Kingdom
Toptal member since July 22, 2022
Fuad excels in building machine learning services from prototype to production, leveraging his diverse ML experience to craft rapid prototypes and discover creative uses for models across many domains. With a solid foundation in maths and programming, he stays at the forefront of the latest research, continually enhancing the solutions he provides to clients. Fuad's passion for developing cutting-edge technology solutions makes him a valuable asset to any team seeking to harness the power of ML.
Portfolio
Experience
- Machine Learning - 7 years
- TensorFlow - 7 years
- Computational Linguistics - 6 years
- Python 3 - 6 years
- Natural Language Understanding (NLU) - 6 years
- PyTorch - 4 years
- Recommendation Systems - 1 year
- Social Network Analysis - 1 year
Availability
Preferred Environment
PyCharm, Python 3, Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jupyter Notebook, Git, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD
The most amazing...
...thing I've developed is an information extraction pipeline processing millions of articles to populate a knowledge graph.
Work Experience
Lead Research Scientist
Thomson Reuters
- Joined Thomson Reuters as part of an acquisition of a company I co-founded.
- Worked on building a leading large language model on legal data.
- Led data-centric ML team growth and research plan.
Founding Member and Principal Research Engineer
Safesign Technologies
- Led the development of a world-leading legal foundation model as the founding member and principal research engineer. The leading model resulted in the company being acquired within eight months.
- Applied the latest cutting-edge research to create a system based on open source models that beat GPT-4 on the legal benchmarks.
- Oversaw the growth of the team and selected top ML talent.
Data Science Consultant
U15 - Group of Canadian Research Universities
- Created a cutting-edge Entity Linking system using RAG retrieval and LLMs to consolidate multiple data sources of university research into one.
- Consulted the client on various AI technologies best suited to improve the product.
- Prototyped an efficient document topic tagging system that can tag millions of documents.
Founder
Idesigns
- Created a platform that allows the people to create designs inspired by their topic of interest, print it on product and get it delivered to their doorstep.
- Moved from idea inception to building the back end and supervising freelancers to build the front end.
- Integrated the app with various services such as Open AI API, text-to-image models on Stable Diffusion, Printify, and Shopify.
Chatbot Consultant
California State University , Long Beach
- Designed and implemented an educational chatbot system.
- Optimized the chatbot flow to respond to questions, run SQL queries, and suggest improvements.
- Worked with the client to improve the chatbot's design to fit the needs of the educational system best.
Machine Learning Consultant
Piggyback Inc
- Created custom flows for Chatbot LLM model and retrieval system for more precise and accurate responses.
- Consulted on the long-term AI strategy of the company.
- Reduced hallucinations of the LLM model through various standard and bespoke methods.
Lead Data Scientist
Koble
- Created a model to guide VC startup investment decisions. The model was a custom transformer network that takes in text and tabular features to predict the success probability of a startup given market, team, and funding features.
- Created an NLP service that classifies companies according to a taxonomy of sectors.
- Developed an NLP service that describes any company activity and products given their raw website.
- Introduced good data science practices and processes to the team.
Machine Learning Consultant
Telescope
- Developed an automated email writing service based on historical emails and generative AI.
- Created a recommender system that suggests people contact based on previous people searched, keywords, and company description.
- Built an email classification system that classifies emails based on the type, e.g., sales, inquiry, follow-up, and more.
Machine Learning Consultant
Springbok
- Developed a system using GPT-3 to automatically create questions and answers from documents, feeding them to a chatbot system answering customers' queries.
- Created a microservice for the linguistically aware natural language understanding (NLU) model to recommend text style correction for technical requirements.
- Produced machine learning (ML) services for multiple natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including text classification and recommendation.
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
ComplyAdvantage
- Built the ML pipeline models to read articles, an information extraction system that feeds into a knowledge graph of criminal and adverse media entities.
- Improved the company's entity extraction and classification system eight times, increasing unique entities in the knowledge graph through implementing the latest NLU research.
- Enhanced the ease of ML model deployment and development by redesigning the monolithic ML pipeline into a microservices-based scalable one.
- Guided the team's growth by helping with research and development projects and managed a junior ML engineer.
- Drove the inclusion of the latest NLP research in the company's solutions.
- Built the ML pipelines and led data collection automation through MLOps practices.
- Introduced an additional entity meta-data for the company's extraction system by developing a relation extractor using distant supervision methods.
- Led a significant refactoring project following a microservices approach to split the company's main article-reading ML pipeline into multiple projects, using Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, and CI/CD.
Experience
Creative Design Work for a Platform
http://www.idesigns.shopStartup Success Predictor
Article Reading System
The tasks involved building the models, dataset creation and collection, and data engineering to create the pipeline.
Abstract Meaning Representation for Paraphrase Detection
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1041/Education
Master's Degree in Artificial Intelligence
The University of Edinburgh - Edinburgh, UK
Master's Degree in Physics and Nanotechnology
The University of Cambridge - Cambridge, UK
Bachelor's Degree in Physics and Nanotechnology
The University of Leeds - Leeds, UK
Skills
Libraries/APIs
PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, Pandas, NetworkX, Scikit-learn, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), REST APIs, Rasa NLU, MTurk API
Tools
Amazon SageMaker, Git, Jupyter, ChatGPT, PyCharm, AWS Fargate, Helm, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, OpenAI Gym, Amazon Lex
Languages
Python 3, Python, SQL
Frameworks
Flask
Paradigms
Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), ETL, Microservices, REST
Platforms
Jupyter Notebook, Linux, MacOS, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda
Storage
Databases, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), NoSQL, MySQL, Data Pipelines
Other
Research, Programming, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), Recommendation Systems, NLU, Annotations, AMR, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Science, Data Reporting, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-term Memory (LSTM), Applied Research, Supervised Machine Learning, Topic Modeling, Chatbots, Deep Learning, Data Analytics, Neural Networks, Technical Hiring, Source Code Review, Code Review, Task Analysis, BERT, Sentiment Analysis, Large Language Models (LLMs), Text Classification, Google Colaboratory (Colab), Data Analysis, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Language Models, Know Your Customer (KYC), Software as a Service (SaaS), OpenAI GPT-3 API, Analytics, OpenAI GPT-4 API, Mathematical Analysis, Statistical Methods, Predictive Modeling, Data Scientist, Decision Trees, Regression, Consulting, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Classification, Hugging Face, Technical Leadership, Leadership, Mentorship & Coaching, OpenAI, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Machine Vision, Social Network Analysis, Bayesian Inference & Modeling, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), APIs, Big Data, Interviewing, Team Management, Language Learning, Risk Analysis, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Finance, Statistical Data Analysis, Algorithms, Conversational Interfaces, PDF Scraping, Scraping, Stable Diffusion, Text to Image, Graphs, Frameworks, LangChain, Pinecone, Computational Physics, Reinforcement Learning, Graph Theory, CI/CD Pipelines, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), Text to Video, AI Design, AI Art Visualization
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