Ikram Ali | Lead Data Scientist | NLP

My name is Ikram Ali and I’m a Lead Data Scientist. I specialize in building ML engineering and data science teams from the ground up.\ My current passion is NLP and MLOps.

I approach my career by purposefully building domain knowledge in all the cross-functional disciplines required to deliver successful Data Science projects. This includes Research, Data Engineering, Machine Learning Engineering, Management, as well as dabbling in Agile Program Management and Product Management within other roles. This allows me to lead cross-functional teams and know the pain points of bringing a model from ideation to production.

I approach people management with the mindset of a mentor and career coach rather than a boss. I get excited about building teams of talented people, and I love seeing my team member’s careers grow!

💼 Experience

KAYAK | Lead Data Scientist | 2017 - Present

• Managing end-to-end data science workflow from data ingest and wrangling to analysis and presentation, including writing code, performing code and deliverable review, and people and project management.
• Developing automated orchestration pipelines for data mining, training, and validation for deep-learning/machine-learning features using MLflow & wandb.ai.
• Match hotel images with millions of hotel reviews to increase visibility on search engine results pages and ensure a better user experience using CLIP, BLIP deep learning models.
• Developed NLP models to extract entities from trip emails using NER Models using deep learning.
• Fine-tune a pretrained Bert model to improve the accuracy of translations.
• Uses Pytorch for developing CNN, RNN, BI-LSTM and NER detection models.
• Bert, Word2vec, fast-text, and Glove are used to create word embeddings.
• Automating the model training and result generation pipeline with Apache Airflow.
• Working with project managers to define use cases, collect data, and benchmark the results.

7+ years hands-on coding and model training experience for analytics, data science and machine learning including recommender systems 5+ year experience managing diverse teams of software engineers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists.

👍 Open-Source Contributions

• Urduhack (Creator): Urduhack is a NLP library for urdu language. It comes with a lot of battery included features to help you process Urdu data in the easiest way possible. Link: urduhack.akkefa.com
• ML-Notes Collection of notes on Machine Learning. Link: ml-notes.akkefa.com
• Haystack (Contributor): Haystack is an end-to-end framework that enables you to build powerful and production-ready pipelines for different search use cases.
• Machine Learning Ops(Contributor): A collection of resources on how to facilitate Machine Learning Ops with GitHub.

🎓 Degree

• Masters in Data Science University of Colorado Boulder

📜 Certifications & Specializations

• Natural Language Processing - a DeepLearning.ai Specialization
• Deep learning - a DeepLearning.ai Specialization
• Data Science Foundations: Statistical Inference Specialization