Yashar Mehdad

Yashar Mehdad is a distinguished technical leader specializing in AI and machine learning, currently serving as Technical Director and Principal AI Architect at Airbnb, focusing on Generative AI and large language models since January 2024. Prior to this role, Yashar held significant positions at Meta from April 2019 to January 2024, contributing to the development of conversational AI agents, multimodal generation for virtual reality, and language technologies for the metaverse. Yashar's expertise is further evidenced by previous roles at Airbnb, Yahoo, stealth startups, and IBM, along with substantial academic achievements, including a PhD in Natural Language Processing from the Università di Trento. Yashar's diverse experience encompasses both research and practical applications in AI, NLP, and machine learning across various domains.