Ali Sahami

Ali Sahami is a Senior Applied Science & Engineering Manager at Etsy since 2022, specializing in recommendation and personalization with a focus on retrieval and first pass ranking. Previously, Ali served as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer and Tech Lead at Apple from 2017 to 2022, enhancing the search engine for Apple Maps with improvements in query understanding, recommendation, and ranking. Prior experience includes roles as a Research Scientist at Yahoo! Labs, as well as scientific staff positions at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Duisburg-Essen, where the research concentrated on Human-Computer Interaction and ubiquitous computing. Ali began a career in academic research at Fraunhofer IAIS as a student assistance in a European project. Ali holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Stuttgart and a Master’s degree in Media Informatics from RWTH Aachen University.