Haris Riaz

PhD Student

Office: GS 710

Interests: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Neuro-Symbolic AI and Reinforcement Learning

Advisor: Dr. Mihai Surdeanu

hriaz@email.arizona.edu

Biography

I’m a first year PhD student in the University of Arizona’s department of Computer Science. I am originally from Pakistan. I obtained a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree in 2021. Previously, I have also interned at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) where I worked on applying machine learning to high energy physics problems.

Research Interests

I am interested in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Neuro-Symbolic AI and Reinforcement Learning.

What long-term project do you want to work on?

One of the things I hope to see in the future is a Question-answering system with human level reasoning capabilities. Presumably, it should also be easy to adapt such a system to different domains of knowledge. “Neuro-Symbolic AI” is one of the most exciting research areas in this regard: it uses ideas from machine learning and symbolic reasoning to develop models that attempt to reason like humans. I could definitely see myself working on this long-term.

What do you enjoy most about your work?

I am very excited about getting the opportunity to do research in cutting edge domains of computer science - it feels meaningful.

What are your career goals

I hope to become a successful AI researcher.

Tell us something interesting about yourself!

In secondary school, I was a finalist in the National Spelling Bee.