‘Know thyself’

Hi — I’m Haidar 🧠🧬

I am an MSc student in Computer Science at the American University of Beirut (AUB) advised by Dr. Rida Assaf, where my research spans core AI fields. I build machine learning and computer vision systems for disease detection in ophthalmology and dementia, develop deep sequence models for DNA, and create generative models for corneal-layer prediction. Alongside this, I’ve proposed a novel architecture that injects spatiotemporal signals into the vanilla Transformer, and used imitation and reinforcement learning to investigate problems in combinatorics and computational geometry. These efforts earned me the 2025 Mobile Technology Tomorrow (MT2) Best Achievement Award for outstanding contributions in computer science research at AUB.

I completed my BSc in Computer Science at the Lebanese University, graduating with honors as top of my batch. I serve as the ACM AI head at AUB this semester and I’m an NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute certified instructor — see the NVIDIA DLI profile.

I aim to build explainable, biologically grounded AI systems guided by the view that progress is cyclical: deeper biological insight leads to better models, and better models reveal new scientific understanding. By studying how humans learn, reason, and evolve, I aim to uncover principles that drive both new architectures and insights into the mechanisms underlying health and disease, while continually seeking out hard, fundamental problems that challenge our understanding of learning and intelligence.

On the side, I enjoy:

• ♟️ Chess
• 📚 Reading (philosophy, psychology, technology, biology, history)
• 🥊 Mixed Martial Arts
• 🌿 Nature