Bridger (Waleed) Ammar, PhD

Dr. Ammar is an educator, engineer, research scientist, author, and a business owner. Before founding HIGG, Dr. Ammar was a

senior research scientist at Google, where he helped develop transformer-based models for generating DNA sequences

based on PacBio long-reads which significantly reduced variant-calling errors [Nature Biotech'22]. He also helped develop

task-oriented dialog systems which are more robust to disfluencies, code-switching and user revisions [arXiv'23]. Prior to

joining Google, Dr. Ammar led the Semantic Scholar research team's efforts to develop ML-based methods to facilitate access

to the literature [e.g., NAACL 19], build a knowledge graph of the scientific literature [NAACL'18], and use this wealth of

information to identify systemic social problems in science [JAMA'19]. He also led the product team for the Semantic Scholar

APIs in 2023. Dr. Ammar occasionally teaches courses at UW linguistics and UW Computer Science as a visiting lecturer. In

2016, he earned his Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University. Before pursuing the Ph.D.,

Waleed was a research engineer at Microsoft Research and a web developer at eSpace Technologies.

1. I was recently invited to speak at GAIN (Global AI Now/Next/Never), and was surprised by the degree to which SCIENCE IS TRANSFORMING KSA (kingdom of Saudi Arabia). Happy to share my key observations on the what, the how, and why it matters to the listeners of the podcast.

2. We recently launched SeeChat x Ideas at https://seechat.ai to help scientists do what they do best, even better: SCIENTIFIC PROBLEM SOLVING. Happy to elaborate on some of the key features we launched and a sneak peek on some of the features in our roadmap.

3. We just launched a first-of-its-kind AI-powered scientific problem solving competition for university students in Egypt at https://lnkd.in/gPCSiPKq. The goal is to HELP EGYPTIAN STUDENTS DO THEIR BEST WORK & SHINE in a highly competitive field, and a brutal job market. Happy to elaborate on the what, the how and why we think that IMPACT CHALLENGE: EGYPT has the potential to make a dent in the Egyptian economy.