Hi there...

My name is Ahmed Salem Mohamed Elhady...or just Salem.

I am a PhD Research Student at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) under the supervision of Mikel Artetxe and Eneko Agirre.

I am working on the analysis and improvement of multi-lingual capabilities in Large Language Models, with a focus on the Intersection of Reasoning and Multilingualism.

Before embarking on my PhD, I worked as an Applied Data Scientist at Microsoft Bing News' Trust and Safety. I also worked as an Applied Data Scientist at Implicit.ai (formerly Agolo), a Microsoft-backed startup, where I worked on multiple projects building knowledge graphs and summarization for enterprise. Notable clients: Franklin Templeton, Acuity, and The Associated Press. All the projects are part of Microsoft’s Azure services now.

News and Highlights

  • Sep 15th, 2025: Talk at the Pittsburgh NLP Seminar

  • July 3rd, 2025: Presented our work at an Online Webinar via Ploutos

  • May 16th, 2025: 2/2 Papers Accepted to ACL 2025 - main track

    1. Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models under Continued Pretraining for Language Adaptation

    2. Wicked: A Simple Method to Make Multiple Choice Benchmarks More Challenging

  • February 26th, 2025

    New Preprint: "Wicked: A Simple Method to Make Multiple Choice Benchmarks More Challenging"

  • News Article about the group's main project

  • April 15th, 2024: our paper on “guided bart” is accepted to NAACL’2024.

    We presented it in oral presentation on June 18th, in Mexico City, Mexico.

  • November 5th, 2023: Our approach, guided bart, ranks 1st on the Cochrane subset of Allen AI’s MSLR shared task

What I do

  • design icon

    Freelance Projects

    I am top rated freelancer on Upwork with 94% job success rate.

  • Web development icon

    Open Source Contribution

    I am a contributor to a soon-to-announce open source project that aims to improve the document analysis in Arabic.

  • quote

    Quips, Quirks, and Jots

    I ponder and write down jots about Religion (Islam), Work, Research, and Others.

  • camera icon

    Street Photography

    I am a street photographer and I love to capture the beauty of the world around me. Checkout my instagram account for photography.

Daniel lewis
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Daniel lewis

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Resume

Experience

  1. HiTZ Center, University of Basque Country

    PhD Student - Research Assistant

    MAR 2024 — FEB 2028

    Working on analysis and evaluation of multilingual capabilities in large langyage models.

  2. Microsoft

    NLP - Applied Data Scientist II

    AUG 2023 – MAR 2024

    Working on Microsoft News’s text feed content understanding and moderation; Using LLMs and Transformer-based models for QA, retrieval, and misinformation identification.

  3. Implicit (formerly Agolo)

    NLP - Applied Data Scientist II

    JUL 2020 – JUL 2023

    - Worked on Conditional Text Generation for Table-to-Text generation using Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning

    - Worked on Knowledge Graphs and Multilingual Relation Extraction

    - Worked on Query/Ontology Based Summarization, Knowledge Graphs, and Query Understanding/Intent Classification.

    - Built Production Ready Deep Learning Models with Hessian-aware Quantization, Distillation, and Self-Supervised Learning

Education

  1. University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)

    2024 — 2028 PhD

  2. Zewail City of Science and Technology

    Feb 2022 – June 2024 Master of Science

    Artificial Intelligence Program, Department of Mathematics and Computer Information

    GPA: 4.0/4.0

    Thesis Topic: Improving Factual Accuracy in Multi-document Summarization of Clinical Documents

  3. Cairo University, Faculty of Engineering

    SEP 2015 – JUN 2020 Bachelor of Science

    GPA: 3.95/4.0, Rank in Class: 2nd

    Graduation Project: Grade: A∗, Topic: Improving Coherence, Readability, and Saliency in extractive summarisation of news articles.

Languages

  • Arabic
    100%
  • English
    90%
  • Spanish
    60%

Publications

  • Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models under Continued Pretraining for Language Adaptation

    Authors: Ahmed Elhady, Eneko Agirre, and Mikel Artetxe

    Venue:

    ACL 2025, Main

    [Paper] [X-thread]

  • WiCkeD: A Simple Method to Make Multiple Choice Benchmarks More Challenging for Language Adaptation

    Authors: Ahmed Elhady, Eneko Agirre, and Mikel Artetxe

    Venue:

    ACL 2025, Main

    [Code]" [Paper] [X-thread]

  • Improving Factuality in Clinical Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization through Guided Continued Pre-training

    Authors: Ahmed Elhady, Khaled Elsayed, Eneko Agirre, and Mikel Artetxe

    Venue:

    NAACL 2024, Main

    [Paper] [X-thread]

Contact