Hello,

I am Salem Lahlou, I recently joined the Department of Machine Learning of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) as an Assistant Professor, focusing on uncertainty estimation, generative models, reinforcement learning sample complexity, and more generally in designing better “AI for science” tools.

If you’re interested in joining my group as a PhD student, Master’s student, research assistant, or postdoc, do not hesitate to send me an e-mail to firstname.lastname@mbzuai.ac.ae.

Before this, I worked at TII as a Senior Researcher. I defended my PhD thesis at Mila and UdeM, under the supervision of Yoshua Bengio, in December 2023.

My research interests are broad. During my PhD, I worked on reinforcement learning, uncertainty estimation, curriculum learning, and probabilistic modeling. I like to use math to get guarantees about the performances of machine learning algorithms, and to develop insights about their behavior and how to improve them. Overall, I am more interested in understanding (and therefore defining) intelligence, be it animal or artificial.

Prior to my PhD, I studied applied mathematics in Ecole Polytechnique and statistical learning in Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay. I did research in game theory and operations research in IBM Research Singapore, and worked as a data scientist in Booking.com in Amsterdam. During my PhD, I interned in Google Brain in Paris, and worked on hierarchical reinforcement learning.

I have provided consulting services to >10 startups. Contact me for more details!