About me

Welcome!

I am Fares Fourati, a postdoctoral researcher at the UKP Lab with Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych in the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt. I work at the intersection of reinforcement learning, deep learning, large language models, and optimization, with the broader goal of advancing the foundations of human-AI collaboration and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

I have done my Ph.D. in Machine Learning at KAUST. My research has been published in leading AI/ML/NLP venues, including ICML, AAAI, AISTATS, EMNLP, and ECAI, and I regularly serve as a reviewer for these conferences.

My research and academic achievements have been recognized through several distinctions. I was selected for the CEMSE Dean’s List at KAUST in two consecutive academic years (2023/2024 and 2024/2025), won first place in the ACM-SIAM Student Competition in 2024, and was named a KAUST AI Rising Star in 2023. Earlier, I won first place at the Marconi Society’s Connectivity Summit in 2021 and became a Kaggle Competitions Expert in 2020.

After ranking in the top 1% nationally in the Tunisian Mathematics and Physics entrance examination for engineering schools (2017), I pursued a Diplôme d’Ingénieur in Multidisciplinary Engineering at the École Polytechnique de Tunisie, graduating in 2020. I then completed an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at KAUST in 2022.

Beyond research, I am passionate about mentoring, writing, and teaching. I have taught courses in AI and machine learning and supervised graduate and undergraduate students. At a deeper level, my work is guided by a longstanding curiosity about intelligence, whether in biological or in artificial systems, and by the conviction that AI can reshape how we understand ourselves and the world. This perspective also inspired my book, To What End? Meditations on AI and Humanity, which explores some philosophical dimensions of AI and its potential implications.