Abdulla Jasem Almansoori

My name is Abdulla Jasem Almansoori (عبدالله جاسم المنصوري). I started my PhD in machine learning at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in 2021, where I am fortunate to be advised by Martin Takáč and Samuel Horváth. Previously, I got my master degree in computer science at the University of Southern California in 2018, and before that I got my bachelor in industrial engineering at Purdue University in 2016.

Research

My interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and optimization. I am generally interested in:

  • collaborative learning (e.g. personalization in federated learning).
  • deep learning theory and optimization (e.g. overparameterization, adaptive algorithms).
  • generative models (e.g. GAN, VAE, diffusion, LLM, etc).

My long-term vision is to design a network of intelligent systems that can learn more efficiently together and tackle bigger, more complicated real-world problems collaboratively.

News

  • 2023 Dec: Presented a poster in the 2nd collaborative learning workshop on a work-in-progress about federated personalization with mixtures of LoRAs. Then went to NeurIPS to present our poster.
  • 2023 Sep: “Byzantine-Tolerant Methods for Distributed Variational Inequalities” got accepted to NeurIPS 2023.
  • 2023 May: “Partial Disentanglement with Partially-Federated GANs (PaDPaF)” got accepted to MLSys 2023 Workshop on Federated Learning Systems.

Publications

See my Google Scholar for an up to date list.

  • Nazarii Tupitsa, Abdulla Jasem Almansoori, Yanlin Wu, Martin Takáč, Karthik Nandakumar, Samuel Horváth, Eduard Gorbunov. Byzantine-Tolerant Methods for Distributed Variational Inequalities. NeurIPS 2023. [paper] [code]
  • Abdulla Jasem Almansoori, Samuel Horváth, and Martin Takáč. Partial Disentanglement with Partially-Federated GANs (PaDPaF). MLSys 2023 Workshop on Federated Learning Systems [paper] [code]
  • Abdurakhmon Sadiev, Aleksandr Beznosikov, Abdulla Jasem Almansoori, Dmitry Kamzolov, Rachael Tappenden, and Martin Takáč. Stochastic Gradient Methods with Preconditioned Updates. arxiv 2022 (under review). [paper] [code]

Professional Experience

  • I started national service 6 months before PhD (Feb 2021) and finished right after my first year (June 2022). I finished military boot camp in Manama Camp, Fujairah, and then got recruited by Dubai Police as a part of the Expo 2020 batch. I received airport security training in Dubai International Airport (DXB), worked at Expo 2020 as a vehicle inspector (from dusty trucks to shiny rolls royces), and then worked as a security guard again in Al Maktoum International Airport (DWC). It had been a great, diverse, mind-opening, humbling experience overall with a slightly hectic shift schedule and long commutes balanced with PhD studies on the side.

  • Worked as a research assistant in the Center of Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University - Abu Dhabi campus for about a year before my PhD, where I was sponsored by the Kawader research assistantship. I was part of the core bioinformatics team. I worked on next-generation sequencing pipelines, mostly submitting slurm jobs of AI-based bioinformatics tools. The team was absolutely great and the work environment was chill (we used to work from home before it was a thing).

Hobbies

I do enjoy my research, but I also have a lot of other interests. Lately, I have been cooking stuff (mostly Italian cuisine). I also love travelling (for food more than sightseeing). Other hobbies include: playing video games (I used to be a kaizo-level platformer player), watching anime, manga, learning languages (Italian and Japanese), photography, opening parentheses (like this one), and eating.

One of the things that helped me start cooking is living abroad alone, and what kept me going is my family. I used to cook rice and chicken (kabsa) abroad because I wanted to survive and eat homey comfort food. Nowadays, I would spend a day or two making lasagne from scratch or sourdough bread or whatever, and my whole family would devour the thing within minutes. There is a beautiful sense of fulfillment that you get when people you care about complement you for the nice food (or coffee) that you make. This gives me the motivation to cook even more delicious stuff. (I wish my publications have this kind of impact.)

Contact Me

You can contact me at abdu.[middle name]@gmail.com.

Note regarding my middle name (which doubles as an interesting way to fool bots)

It is customary to use the naming format [first name + father’s name (+ desired number of ancestors) + last name] in the arab world because many people share the same first + last name (e.g. imagine being called John Smith). We use the shortest length that can sufficiently distinguish us in the given setting. In the US, I would use the standard two-name format (first + last) as it is slightly unlikely to see another person sharing the same name abroad at the same institution, for example (though it is still possible). In research, I would use three names (first + father + last) because there could be another researcher in marine biology called Abdulla Almansoori, for example. During my national service, however, I had to use four or even five names! You would be surprised at how many times people sharing the same 3-name have been confused for each other (either first + father + grandfather or first + father + last), especially when the assembly list is sorted alphabetically.