Mahmoud Azab

Contact University of Michigan - Ann Arbor E-mail: mazab@umich.edu

Information Computer Science and Engineering Webpage: web.eecs.umich.edu/∼mazab
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Mobile: +1 (919) 809-3792

Education University of Michigan

Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering, 2019 (expected).
Thesis: Multimodal Character Representation for Visual Story Understanding
Advisor : Prof. Rada Mihalcea
Committee: Prof. Jia Deng, Prof. Emily Provost, Prof. Vinod Vydiswaran

University of Michigan
M.Sc., Computer Science and Engineering, 2018.
Advisor: Prof. Rada Mihalcea

Cairo University
B.Eng., Computer Engineering, 2011.
Thesis: Text summarization and visualization

Research Natural language processing, computer vision, multimodal machine learning

Interests and applied machine learning

Professional University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA September 2014-Present

Experience Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Designed and developed a solution for speaker and character naming in movies
using weakly supervised multimodal joint optimization framework
• Developing multimodal learning algorithms for movie story understanding. Our
model achieves state-of-the-art results on the subtitles task on MovieQA bench-
mark
• Developing multimodal movie characters embeddings that capture different per-
spectives of characters’ relations based on their interactions. Our model out-
performs Word2Vec and other competitive baselines in terms of relatedness and
multiple classification tasks
• Developing multimodal movie characters embeddings that capture different per-
spectives of characters relations based on their interactions. Our model outper-
form Word2Vec and other competitive baselines
• Developing dialog agents for capturing cancer family history
• Developed text-based constrained model for phrase localization in images. Our
model used coreference relations in text-representation to add spatial constraint
over their corresponding bounding boxes

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Palo Alto, USA May-August 2018

Research Scientist Intern
• Designed and developed deep learning architectures for relation extraction be-
tween concepts in biomedical literature
• outperformed the current state-of-the-art system with a significant margin on
different benchmarks

IBM Research - Almaden, San Jose, USA May-August 2016

Research Intern
• Designed and developed deep learning architectures for email prioritization
 Carnegie Mellon University, Doha, Qatar April 2012–August 2014
Research Associate
Advisor: Prof. Kemal Oflazer
• Built UIMA interfaces for core NLP algorithms and linguistic resources
• Designed and developed an NLP-based web-accessible reading application
• Developed a classification-based framework to automate translation decisions for
named entities in a statistical machine translation system

Mentor Graphics, Cairo, Egypt August 2011–February 2012

Software Developer Intern
• Developed an eclipse-based IDE prototype for VHDL
• Built grammar rules for VHDL
• Implemented IDE’s main features

Airbus Defence & Space, Ulm, Germany August-October 2010

Software Developer Intern
• Implemented image processing algorithms for object tracking
• Developed some features in video content analysis software

Teaching Computer Science, University of Michigan

Graduate Student Instructor, Information Retrieval, Winter 2016

Publications 5. Mahmoud Azab, Mingzhe Wang, Max Smith, Noriyuki Kojima, Jia Deng, Rada
Mihalcea. Speaker Naming in Movies. North American Chapter of the Association
for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2018.
4. Mingzhe Wang, Mahmoud Azab, Noriyuki Kojima, Rada Mihalcea, Jia Deng.
Structured Matching for Phrase Localization. European Conference on Computer
Vision (ECCV), 2016.
3. Mahmoud Azab, Rada Mihalcea, Jacob Abernethy. Analysing RateMyProfessors
Evaluations across Institutions, Disciplines, and Cultures: The Tell-tale Signs of a
Good Professor. International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo), 2016.
2. Mahmoud Azab, Houda Bouamor, Behrang Mohit and Kemal Oflazer. Dudley
North visits North London: Learning When to Transliterate to Arabic. North
American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL),
2013.
1. Mahmoud Azab, Ahmed Salama, Kemal Oflazer, Hideki Shima, Jun Araki, and
Teruko Mitamura. An NLP-based reading tool for aiding non-native English read-
ers. Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP), 2013.

Demos 2. Mahmoud Azab, Chris Hokamp, Rada Mihalcea. Using Word Semantics To Assist
English as a Second Language Learners. HLT-NAACL 2015.
1. Mahmoud Azab, Ahmed Salama, Kemal Oflazer, Hideki Shima, Jun Araki, and
Teruko Mitamura. An English Reading Tool as a NLP Showcase, in Proceedings
of IJCNLP 2013.

Academic Reviewer: EMNLP 2017, AAAI 2019, NAACL 2019

Service

Technical Python, Java, C++, SQL, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS

Skills Tools: Pytorch, Keras, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, UIMA

Awards IEEE Student Enterprise Award 2008/2009