Applied AI Engineer & Researcher

Pro, and to be more pro by the time. Just need to imagine ✨

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Basem Rizk

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Experience

Jan 2026 – Present · San Francisco, CA

Applied AI Engineer

CodeRabbit

June 2024 – Jan 2026 · San Ramon, CA

AI Engineer

Redblock

Led the development from the ground-up of on-premise Agentic AI solution to automate reliably identity tasks of any web application lying between computer-use and RPA.
Achieved with my agent 28%+ better than the top-performing competitor agents on in-house identity tasks benchmark, with a remarkable 0% fault rates.
Built pre-liminary agent to explore the available features in web-apps and automate repetitive tasks in SAS Applications.
Filed a number of provisional patents for methodology, novel approach as well as use cases in the domain.

May 2023 – May 2024

AI/ML Research Scientist

Learning Sciences Lab, Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)

Crafted an optimized pipeline for video content analysis and understanding, fusing 10+ CV and NLP methods ranging from Sentence Segmentation and Key-Frame Selection to Dense Captioning and Graph Construction (PI. Dr. Ben Nye).
Built downstream task heads on top of the pipeline for tasks such as Video Type Classification, Competencies Detection, and Multi-modal Reference-based Prompting.
Designed an algorithm to query database of videos and interactively inject new domain-specific knowledge employing knowledge graphs on the basis of lexical databases.

Dec 2022 – Jun 2024

NLP Research Assistant

CUTE LAB NAME, NLP Group, Information Sciences Institute (ISI)

Investigated companion bots for tracking Python notebook development using large language models (LLMs) and improved quality of generated corresponding question-answer pairs by 80%. (PI. Dr. Jonathan May and Dr. Jay Pujara).
Built with team of 3, an LLM-based moderator agent that persuades users to apply non-violent communication strategies through DARPA Civil Sanctuary applied research (PI. Dr. Jonathan May and Dr. Kristina Lerman).
Designed and developed a configurable dynamic prompting framework that allows hooking up endpoints and APIs.

Jan 2022 – June 2023

AI/ML Lead

NASA S.U.I.T.S Challenge, Team AEGIS (USC/UA, USC/UCBerkeley)

Led AI division to construct off-cloud Digital Assistant on local server, communicating with Microsoft Hololens 2, playing our Augmented Reality (AR) solution to reduce cognitive load and fatigue of astronauts throughout procedures on EVA missions.
Architected and implemented a client-agnostic framework employing open-source libraries for speech-to-text, dialogue management, and text-to-speech.
Received great feedback from experts' trials on the Rock Yard Site at Johnson Space Center and from a panel of astronauts.

May 2022 – Jul 2022 · Marina Del Rey, CA

Founding Software Engineer Intern (AI/ML Oriented)

TadHealth

Devised starting blocks and outlined System Specifications Requirements (SRS) for future blocks of confidential AI-powered system, including an extensible web-scraping component, database management system, and NLP-oriented controller.

May 2022 – Jul 2022

Computer Vision Research Assistant

Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL), USC

Leveraged attention and pose detection libraries to enable analysis in 300+ videos of interactions between potential autistic kids and caregivers.

Sep 2020 – Jul 2021

Teacher Assistant (Adjunct Lecturer)

GUC, Egypt

Taught the practical sessions to students and graded assessments in Constraint Programming (Graduate Course) and as part of a team, in Software Engineering Lab and Advanced Databases courses.
Expanded curriculum by adding Google OR-Tools, designed final project, and supervised students during implementation.

Mar 2019 – Jun 2019

Speech Recognition Research Intern

Institute for Information Systems, Germany

Compiled and evaluated ASR on a number of machine architectures while studying underlying ML models' architectures.
Trained FB Wav2Letter model, from scratch, achieving 79% accuracy on LibriSpeech other-test dataset.
Investigated performance and compared against previous data by the institute through a bachelor thesis titled "Evaluation of State of Art ASR Engines with Local Inferencing," selecting the institute's ASR system choice for the smart speaker project.
Gained 23+ citations (including Amazon Alexa and Meta AI Research) per followed conference paper and resulting thesis.

Featured Research

Estuary: A Framework For Building Multimodal Low-Latency Real-Time Socially Interactive Agents

ACM IVA '24 CHI '25 Case Study

A framework for building multi-modal agents that perceive, reason about, and respond to social cues in real-time human interactions. Estuary integrates vision, language, and behavioral models into a unified architecture for socially aware AI.

ACM DL Google Scholar arXiv

From Videos to Knowledge Graphs — Framework to Marry Methods for Multimodal Content Analysis and Understanding

arXiv 2025 USC ICT Learning Sciences

A framework that translates raw video into a frame-indexed knowledge graph, fusing 10+ pre-trained CV and NLP models — sentence segmentation, key-frame selection, dense captioning, graph construction — into one queryable, continually-learning representation for specialized educational domains.

arXiv Google Scholar

Academic & Personal Projects

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) Classification

2023

Achieved SOTA competitive results with 74.8% recall by novel approach of considering volume correlations with multi-atlas spatio-contextual GINs in 3-way AD from structural MRI images classification on ADNI dataset split.

Emotion Recognition Per Context Modeling Reproduction Study 2022

Reproduced (Lee and Lee, 2021) work as part of a team of 2 to detect emotions in conversations, employing pre-trained language models without requiring structured knowledge bases.
Generated 20% of 2 datasets based on English-Arabic subtitles alignment and showed comparable accuracies of both to English datasets in evaluation.

Dependency Trees Parsing Using Neural Networks 2022

Reproduced (Chen et al., 2014) with ARC-Standard and ARC-Eager transition-based parsing with PyTorch on CoNLL data and experimented with learning word embeddings.

Constrained Compensation System for GUC 2019

Ranked best project in class, modeled as Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) in Prolog CLPFD, interfacing with Django API.
Architected as model engine and query formatter. SQL tables are created, then Prolog queries are formatted and issued.

Education

Master of Science

Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence)

University of Southern California (USC) →

Aug 2021 – Dec 2023 · GPA: 3.76

Dean's Scholarship

CSCI 699 Theory of Machine Learning PhD EE 638 Applications of ML for Medical Data PhD CSCI 566 Deep Learning and Its Applications CSCI 662 Advanced Natural Language Processing PhD CSCI 567 Machine Learning CSCI 570 Analysis of Algorithms CSCI 571 Web Technologies CSCI 561 Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

5-Year Bachelor of Engineering

Computer Science and Engineering

German University in Cairo (GUC) →

Sep 2015 – Aug 2020 · GPA: 3.9 "High Honors"

Machine Learning Rule-based and Constraint Programming Computer Vision Computer Security Intro to Biomedical Engineering Intro to Deep Learning with Self-Driving Cars Game Dev in Unity Affective Computing Seminar

All course details

Bachelor Thesis Evaluation of State-of-the-Art Open-Source ASR Engines with Local Inferencing

Advised by Prof. René Peinl at Institute of Information Systems (iisys), Hof, Germany.

Skills & Leadership

Programming Languages

PythonJavaProlog/CHRJavascript/TSC#C/C++SQLHaskell/LambdaSystem VerilogAssemblyBash

Frameworks & Tools

LangGraphLangChainTransformersPytorchScikit-LearnTensorflow/KerasNumpyPandasSocketIOFlaskDjangoNodeJsScrapyOR-ToolsCLPFDAndroidUnitySlurm/HPC

Leadership

Viterbi Grad LeaderUSC MENA Student Assembly — DirectorGUC Speech Club — HeadINSIDER GUC News & Reporting CommitteeAI/ML Division Lead, Team AEGIS (USC/UCBerkeley) NASA SUITS

Spoken Languages

Arabic · Native English · Native German · Elementary

Constellation

A live view of the people who shaped this work — and the ones who shaped them. Tap or hover any node for the affiliation, shared publication, and a direct link out (homepage for collaborators, Wikipedia for the historical anchors). Distant anchors are reached through chains of co-authorship.

Me PI / Advisor Co-author Chain hop Historical anchor

Dr. Jonathan May · USC Viterbi · ISI

Dr. Benjamin Nye · USC ICT · Learning Sciences

Dr. Kristina Lerman · USC Viterbi · ISI

Dr. Jay Pujara · USC ISI

Dr. Jonathan Gratch · USC ICT

Dr. Sharon Mozgai · USC ICT

Dr. Ajitesh Srivastava · USC Viterbi

Spencer Lin · USC ICT

Scott Fisher · USC ICT · Interactive Media

Miru Jun · USC ICT

René Peinl · Institut für Informationssysteme · GUC thesis advisor

Robert Szabad · Institut für Informationssysteme

Hyundong Cho · USC ISI · NLP

Mark Core · USC ICT

Harsha V. Khurdula · RedBlock AI

Indus Khaitan · RedBlock AI · Founder

Paul Erdős·Erdős number: 4

Alan Turing·Turing number: 5

Herbert A. Simon·Simon number: 3

Claude Shannon·Shannon number: 5

John von Neumann·Neumann number: 5

Marvin Minsky·Minsky number: 3

Geoffrey E. Hinton·Hinton number: 3

Judea Pearl·Pearl number: 3

Donald E. Knuth·Knuth number: 4

Alonzo Church·Church number: 5