I do machine learning for a living. The theoretical side fascinates me, but over the past decade or so, the applied side is where I have spent most of my time: building things that work, breaking things that should have worked, and occasionally wondering why they worked at all.

I am a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and a Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy. At UWE Bristol, I am a member of the Computer Science Research Centre and the Data Science and Mathematics Research Group, and I direct the MSc in Financial Technologies. I lead AI and Data at Explore Learning, where I develop algorithmic personalisation for adaptive learning platforms and manage data science teams delivering production ML at scale. More recently, I started teaching at Birzeit University in Palestine.

My career has taken me through Palestine, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK. I did my PhD and MSc at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, then a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Utrecht University and VORtech BV in the Netherlands, where I built Par@Graph, a parallel toolkit for large-scale climate network analysis. It was featured in Networks in Climate (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and is still used by oceanographers today.

Along the way, I have led research with GE Aerospace, Innovate UK, and the British Council, co-founded three MSc programmes, supervised over 40 MSc dissertations and multiple PhDs, and lectured at universities across Europe, in China and Hong Kong.