Zahi Karam

Zahi Karam has a diverse work experience spanning over a decade. Zahi started their career as an Undergraduate Research Assistant at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where they focused on visual tracking and image processing. Zahi then worked as an R&D Engineering Intern at Nexidia, where they explored methods for reducing false alarms in the wordspotting system and improved Arabic models.

Zahi continued their research as a Graduate Research Assistant at MIT, working under the supervision of Prof. Alan V. Oppenheim at the Digital Signal Processing Group. Zahi also completed another internship at Nexidia, where they researched the feasibility of a hand-held portable device for the blind.

Zahi then joined Microsoft Research as a Research Intern, gaining valuable industry experience before transitioning to Johns Hopkins University. At Johns Hopkins, they contributed to the "Robust Speaker Recognition Over Varying Channels" team by developing a method for handling variability in the SVM optimization.

In 2007, Zahi began working as a Graduate Research Assistant at MIT Lincoln Laboratory/MIT Digital Signal Processing Group, where they explored graph embedding techniques for improved speaker verification. Zahi also contributed to the team's submission to the NIST speaker recognition competition and worked on handling variability in SVM optimization.

In 2011, Zahi became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, further expanding their research capabilities. Zahi then joined Bluecore in 2015, starting as a Director of Data Science before becoming a Principal Data Scientist. Currently, they hold the position of Vice President of Data Science at Bluecore, a role they have held since January 2020.

Zahi Karam earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1999 to 2003. Zahi then went on to pursue a SM in Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2003 to 2005. Lastly, they obtained a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2005 to 2011.