Hassan Soliman –
AI/ML Engineer & Researcher
Hello, I am currently working as a Researcher at DFKI in Berlin. I earned a Master’s degree in CS with an excellent grade at Saarland University in Germany. During my Master’s, I worked at Bosch in Germany, Amazon EU in Luxembourg, and Max-Planck Institute für Informatik in Germany.
INTERESTS
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Generative AI
Large-scale Language Modelling (LLM)
Conversational AI
Chatbots & Retrieval Augmented Generation
EXPERIENCE
German Research Center for AI (DFKI)
Researcher
Jan 2023 - Present
• Joined the Educational Technology lab, owned two projects technically, and supervised two research assistants.
• Developed a chatbot for a graduate-level course at a German University, that answers students' questions based on the lecture, seminar, and organisational information, achieving 86.7% correct responses, and published a poster.
• Implemented a sub-module in dialogue systems, that adapts the assistant's utterances based on the user's emotional state and demographic properties, benchmarking the results using OpenAI LLMs with two open-source models.
• Supported team members in their projects by developing an Information Extraction system, which extracts words or a span of words from text based on a pre-defined set of keywords, and contributed to project acquisition meetings.
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI)
Applied Scientist Intern
May 2022 - Aug 2022
• Joined NLP & Semantic Reasoning group, and Utilized my master thesis output in Neural Entity Linking for a real use case in a top project.
• Refactored, tested & documented my code, and worked on training & evaluating the developed ML system on large-scale domain-specific data.
• Model performance is evaluated by comparing with the existing classical system, and achieved a 77% end-to-end recall at the top 3 entities.
Berlin, Germany
Renningen, Germany
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI)
Master's Thesis Student
Jun 2021 - Jan 2022
• Joined NLP & Semantic Reasoning group, collaborated with research scientists & engineers, and worked on Cross‑domain Neural Entity Linking.
• Utilized a state‐of‐the‐art model to make it easy‐to‐extend‐domain, and experimented which data & information sources are best for fine‐tuning.
• Achieved an Average Precision gain of 9% for the top‑1 entity, and published a paper in RepL4NLP at ACL 2022 venue.
Renningen, Germany
Max Planck Institut for Informatics (MPII)
Research Assistant
Nov 2020 - May 2021
• Joined Database & Information Systems group, and created a prototype for a model that finds diverse peer groups for an entity.
• Implemented a baseline model on the set expansion for an entity that exploits Wiki lists as a source of knowledge.
• Accomplished a 3x faster runtime of the underlying algorithm using an efficient sparse matrix multiplication approach.
Saarbrücken, Germany
Amazon
Software Development Engineer Intern
Aug 2019 - Feb 2020
• Joined Fulfillment Acceleration team, and owned a web application simulation tool by working on it as a Full-stack, using AWS cloud platform.
• Worked in an Agile environment as a system admin to maintain the server hosting team’s tools, and acted as technical support for the team.
• Developed a tool for data visualization on maps, and provided workshops for the Business Analysts & Intelligent team members.
Luxembourg, Luxembourg
EDUCATION
Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarland University
Master of Science in Computer Science
GPA: 1.40 / 1.00
Faculty of Engineering,
Alexandria University
Bachelor of Science in Computer & Communication Engineering
GPA: 3.96 / 4.00
Saarbrücken, Germany
Alexandria, Egypt
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Udacity Foundation
Deep Learning Nanodegree
2018
Alexandria University
First Class Honor Degree
2018
2022
2018
PROJECTS
Scalable Mentoring Support with a LLM Chatbot
Research Project
• Designed and implemented a chatbot based on an LLM-based Agent to provide scalable educational support and timely feedback to students of education sciences, demonstrating significant potential of generative AI in education.
• Utilized Advanced techniques in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance chatbot interactions, e.g., Hybrid Ensemble Search and Reranking Mechanism, enabling it to retrieve and analyze course materials effectively.
Using LLMs for Adaptive Dialogue Management
Research Project
• Adapted user-directed utterances using LLMs based on the user's parameters like gender, age, and sentiment, aiming to optimize user satisfaction in conversational AI systems, focusing on healthcare patient-practice interactions.
• Evaluated different LLMs and open-source tools for effectiveness in utterance adaptation, in terms of speed, cost-effectiveness, and quality of the generated text based on the adaptation relevancy and adaptation adequacy.
2024
2023
Information Extraction Pipeline in Medical Text
Research Project
• Extracted symptoms from medical text data (prescriptions) in the German language based on a set of doctor-predefined symptoms and their synonyms.
• Extracted additionally other symptoms based on a comprehensive ontology for the symptoms, which is provided by the German Ministry for health.
2023
Better Diet to fight COVID-19
Master's Project
• Analysed food consumption from all countries to investigate a relationship between country food culture \& their recovery rate, using Analytics.
• Implemented three Random Forest models and benchmarked the results to report the best one, and displayed figures using Seaborn library.
2021
TF-IDF-based Information Retrieval
Master's Project
• Built a system that takes a query as input and returns a certain number of relevant documents, using various statistics.
• Implemented a second step to retrieve and rank relevant sentences from the relevant documents, achieving a Mean Reciprocal Rank of 0.393.
2020
PUBLICATIONS
Venues | ACL'22 RepL4NLP workshop
May 2022
Hassan Soliman, Heike Adel, Mohamed H. Gad-Elrab, Dragan Milchevski, and Jannik Strötgen. 2022. A Study on Entity Linking Across Domains: Which Data is Best for Fine-Tuning?. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP, ACL, 184–190, Dublin, Ireland
THESES
Cross-Domain Neural Entity Linking
Master's Thesis Project
• Contributed to a single system that enables simultaneous linking of named entities to a general-domain KB (Wikipedia) & a domain-specific KB.
• Utilized Semantic Search by learning a joint vector space for these KBs from different domains using contextual-aware embeddings by BERT.
• Experimented with four different domain-specific KBs, and achieved an increase of up to 20% in Mean Average Precision for the top-10 entities.
• Helped in writing an invention report for my thesis contribution, which is published as a US patent application, and received an Incentive-Prämie.
Egyptian Car License Plate Information Detection
Bachelor's Thesis Project
• Implemented an application which extracts license information from car images in Egypt, going over the different product life cycle stages.
• Collected datasets for various kinds of car plates in Egypt in various conditions, and applied different Data Transformation (ETL) techniques.
• Utilized pre-trained CNN models for fine-tuning for Object Detection, Localization, Semantic Segmentation, and OCR for the letters & numbers.
2022
2018
PREPRINTS