Amman Yusuf

Computer scientist coding away … 🧑‍💻🤺

I am Amman, born in Italy 🇮🇹, currently living in Cowtown Canada 🇨🇦. My interest in coding started in my high school robotics class where I coded up battle bots (with Arduino brains) to duke it out in a high-stakes tournament. From there, my passion in coding blossomed at the University of Calgary, where I graduated first class. Through my degree I took on various projects and internships. While varied, the common theme between my experience is challenging, interesting, and fulfilling work.

I started developing websites (I still do) in my first role, which got me involved in AWS, which then got working with data in my data science role, which opened up my interest in machine learning, which got me interested in computer vision and deep learning, which culminated (so far) in my final year thesis project in Federated Learning. Apart from work experience, I still have a great interest in distributed applications and theory. One of my favourite courses from my degree was “Introduction to Distributed Algorithms” where we proved the correctness of distributed algorithms. It was a delight understanding how the algorithms work and the proofs at the end were no short of amazing.

I’m currently part of Dr. Mijung Park’s lab on privacy and safety as an MSc student (Park Lab).

Current interests: diffusion models, text diffusion models, privacy, safety, and responsible AI.

I attended the CIFAR Deep Learning + Reinforcement Learning (DLRL) Summer School hosted by Amii, where I focused on reinforcement learning, heard talks from Adam White, Marlos Machado, Martha White, and Richard Sutton, explored KAN networks in RL settings, and made strong connections across the international deep learning community.

Previously, I worked under the supervision of Dr. Tamer Jarada (internship - machine learning for healthcare data) and Dr. Farhad Maleki (bachelor’s honours thesis - federated learning and computer vision).

I also worked at EV.com under the supervision of Haoxu Wang, where I refined my software development skills and started working on CarAI (a voice agent) using RAG, GraphRAG, LLMs, and voice agent systems.

Outside of work, I fenced with the University of Calgary Fencing Club as a sabre fencer and helped with volunteering, teaching, and coaching.