About
AI research & engineering.
I'm Mazen — born and raised in Dhahran, now in Riyadh. I build AI systems and the infrastructure they run on. Right now that's research and engineering at a government entity; before, the founding team at DEEP.SA and ML systems at Malaa. My academic research was real-time multi-object tracking and object detection, in the Deep Machine Vision lab at Oregon State. What I work on now is making agents reliable enough to put in front of real users — the harnesses, evals, and retrieval that decide whether they hold up.
Papers and projects are on the research page; the full run of roles and moves is on the news page.
Education
Praise
I miss you already, Mazen. You had a huge impact on project success and are a delightful collaborator. It was a pleasure and a privilege working with you.
I can say without hesitation that Mazen is the best TA I've worked with thus far. I had a lot of trouble this quarter with project 3 and reached out to another TA for help. After 45 minutes of typing back and forth, I was nowhere closer to understanding the project. I reached out to Mazen, who immediately hopped on a call for a debugging session. In 15 minutes, we resolved issues I had been stuck on for one week. He's gifted intellectually, but he's also very kind and didn't once blame me for not understanding something. He created a very open learning environment where I felt free to express my concerns and questions.
One of more than ten students who wrote in with the same thing.
Thanks Mazen, you did a great job on the demo and really represented us well. Your help was crucial to this success.
Alan Fern and Fuxin Li, the Oregon State professors who supervised the Machine Common Sense work, put the April 2023 result down to that approach — 31 of 32 tracks in the final DARPA evaluation — crediting the insistence on grounding the research in real software practice and evaluating models systematically rather than anecdotally. And across every group I've worked in, the feedback lands in roughly the same place: hard-working, and good company while doing it.
Life goals
Things I want to do before I die, borrowed as a format from Chip Huyen's List 100. If you have a recommendation, tell me.
- 1 Get a Master's degree Sep 2022 — done
- 2 Become one of the authors of a paper at a top-tier conference CVPR 2021 Jan 2021 — done
- 3 Become the first author of a paper at a top-tier conference — not yet
- 4 Get a PhD paused — paused
- 5 Reach 500 citations — not yet
- 6 Review for a top-tier conference — not yet
- 7 Serve on a program committee — not yet
- 8 Reproduce a landmark paper end to end — not yet
- 9 Supervise someone to their first publication — not yet
- 10 Teach a course — not yet
- 11 Teach a graduate-level course — not yet
- 12 Work as a scientist at one of the FAANG companies — not yet
- 13 Publish a Python package pyreqpp Jul 2022 — done
- 14 Get an affiliation on Twitch Jun 2020 — done
- 15 Publish an NPM package — not yet
- 16 Publish more than 50 posts 11 / 50 — not yet
- 17 Write a book — not yet
- 18 Get a patent — not yet
- 19 Speak at an international conference — not yet
- 20 Program or write every day for a year — not yet
- 21 Pre-train a model from scratch at real scale — not yet
- 22 Train a model on 1,000+ GPUs — not yet
- 23 Write a CUDA kernel that beats the library implementation — not yet
- 24 Implement a transformer from scratch with no references — not yet
- 25 Write a training run that recovers from a crash unattended — not yet
- 26 Profile and fix a real GPU bottleneck — not yet
- 27 Train something on a budget everyone said was impossible — not yet
- 28 Build an agent that runs autonomously for a week — not yet
- 29 Ship an eval harness other people adopt — not yet
- 30 Get an MCP server into wide use — not yet
- 31 Have an agent open a pull request a maintainer merges unedited — not yet
- 32 Run agents in production against real user traffic — not yet
- 33 Write an agent framework from scratch — not yet
- 34 Top a public agent benchmark — not yet
- 35 Build a memory system that beats RAG baselines — not yet
- 36 DSPy — not yet
- 37 Hermes Agent — not yet
- 38 An inference engine vLLM SGLang — not yet
- 39 Transformers — not yet
- 40 Unsloth — not yet
- 41 PyTorch core — not yet
- 42 Get 1,000 GitHub stars on a project — not yet
- 43 Build a tool used by 10,000 people — not yet
- 44 Maintain a project with outside contributors — not yet
- 45 Have my work cited in someone else's paper — not yet
- 46 Have a stranger tell me they use something I built — not yet
- 47 Ship something that runs in production for five years — not yet
- 48 Start a non-profit organization sa/acc Dec 2024 — done
- 49 Start a startup — not yet
- 50 Mentor 100 Saudi engineers 47 and counting — not yet
- 51 Reach financial independence — not yet
- 52 Make real income from something that isn't a salary — not yet
- 53 Fund someone else's work — not yet
- 54 Learn an instrument — not yet
- 55 Master a new hard skill in under 48 hours — not yet
- 56 Write down how I learn things fast — not yet
- 57 Teach someone else the 48-hour method — not yet
- 58 Build a piece of furniture — not yet
- 59 Have someone credit my work as why they got into AI — not yet
- 60 Leave a project that outlives my involvement — not yet
- 61 Write something still read in ten years — not yet
- 62 Live in another country (US) — done
- 63 Live in a different country for over 2 years (other than the US) — not yet
- 64 Finish the Duolingo Chinese course — not yet
- 65 Pass HSK 3 — not yet
- 66 Pass HSK 4 — not yet
- 67 Pass HSK 5 — not yet
- 68 Pass HSK 6 — not yet
- 69 Visit 50 countries — not yet
- 70 Set foot on every continent — not yet
- 71 See the northern lights — not yet
- 72 See a total solar eclipse — not yet
- 73 Dive the Red Sea — not yet
- 74 Cross the Empty Quarter — not yet
- 75 Sleep under the stars in AlUla — not yet
- 76 Hike to Everest base camp — not yet
- 77 Ride in a hot-air balloon — not yet
- 78 Take a multi-day train journey — not yet
- 79 Eat sushi in Japan — not yet
- 80 Learn to make bread properly — not yet
- 81 Grow something I can eat — not yet
- 82 Build and ship in public ongoing — ongoing
- 83 Leave people better than I found them ongoing — ongoing
Elsewhere
Find me on X, LinkedIn, and GitHub, or email hello@ma7.dev.