Ali F
- Research Program Mentor

PhD at University of Texas Austin (UT Austin)

Expertise

Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Arabic Linguistics

Bio

Ali Farghaly is a Google scholar with over 1500 citations. He is an expert in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence and has published numerous papers in leading journals. Farghaly is a Professor of Linguistics and a former Chairman of the English Department at Academy of Arts in Giza. He also taught at leading US universities such as University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Stanford University in California. He also held key positions at several high-tech companies such as SYSTRAN Software company and Oracle USA. He is also a frequent speaker at international conferences and has been invited to give keynote addresses at several events. He is interested in natural language understanding (NLU) and creating computer systems that come as close as possible to human interaction using natural language. He likes to challenge himself and to challenge his students. He is an extrovert and thus loves human interaction. Mentoring brilliant young students gives him immense personal satisfaction.

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Artificial Intelligence and Hunan Intelligence

This is an investigation into the relationship between human intelligence (HI) and current applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We examine the basic assumption that AI is an attempt to mimic natural HI. We want to determine what areas both AI and HI agree and what areas they disagree. We would like also to consider how far AI reflects our understanding of what Human Intelligence is. In areas where they disagree, what impact does that have on current AI applications.

How smart are AI Applications?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) aims to mimic human intelligence. When successful (especially generative AI) it produces applications that can exhibits behavior like what smart people do. Applications such as ChatGPT can engage in a a serious conversation with a human being, come up with a piece of code in Python, Java, C++ or any other program ming language to solve a complex problem, can write a smart power point presentation on a topic can produce videos according to users request and specification, etc. However, though AI application may behave like smart human beings in some areas, the way AI works is fundamentally different from the way humans acquire intelligence. For example, while AI depends crucially on very large amounts of data and on previous encounters of clues in its data (machine learning) to make decisions, human intelligence can make decisions on unseen and novel problems very easily. This research is multifaceted and different students can different aspects of the general problem under investigation.

Coding skills

Python

Languages I know

Arabic

Teaching experience

I taught Linguistics at Stanford University, Kuwait University and the American University in Cairo. I also taught Arabic Linguistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As a visiting professor at the Faculty of Computers and Information at Cairo University, Egypt, I taught and supervised research in NLP. I also worked at well established tech companies such as Oracle and SYSTRAN.I have also mentored students both at various institutions and elsewhere. My students did publish their research which was well received.