Ali Taha

Who am I?

I'm Ali. I'm a 3rd-year Computer Engineering student at the University of Waterloo, focusing on Software Engineering and Machine Learning research. When I'm not coding, you can find me in the gym, out on a hike, or, if the weather's justtt right, I'll jump out of planes.

Experience

  • ML Research Assistant
  • Tesla
  • Watonomous
  • Ford
  • BlackBerry

Machine Learning Research Assistant - University of Waterloo

Jan 2025 – Present | Waterloo, Ontario

  • Refined transformer architectures by distinguishing contextual meanings in text-based corpora.
  • Improved semantic understanding in Large-Language Models by classifying conditional probability distributions.
  • Collaborated with a research team to enhance multi-head attention mechanisms.

Projects

LunarLander - Reinforcement Learning

Bare Metal Neural Network

LunarLander - Reinforcement Learning

Engineered a Deep Q-Network (DQN) to autonomously land a rocket in a simulated lunar environment. Used TensorFlow and Keras to implement a dual-network architecture with experience replay and soft updates, reducing training time by 50%.

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Bare Metal Neural Network

Implemented dense layers, forward/backward propagation, and custom optimizers (SGD, Adam) using only Python and NumPy. Developed and tested activation functions (ReLU, Softmax) and loss functions (categorical cross-entropy) from scratch.

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Education

University of Waterloo

Bachelor of Computer Engineering (Honours)

Sep 2022 – May 2027 | Waterloo, ON

Technical Skills