Overview

Gender

male

Investor Stage

Early stage Venture,Seed

With more than 20 years of expertise in bringing cutting edge technology from academia to market, Hassan Sawaf is well-recognized in the field of applied science and machine learning, with applications in machine translation, speech recognition, computer vision, natural language understanding and dialog, process optimization, and other fields.

Hassan was until June 2020 Director, Facebook AI with a focus on building machine learning technology to leverage multimodal signals for comprehension, machine induction and personalization across various applications in various domains, among them applications in the augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) field.

Before that, he was Director, Applied Science and Artificial Intelligence at Amazon Web Services from 2016 to 2019, and was responsible with his team to drive science for existing machine learning services on AWS and incubate new technologies and services in this field for the AWS customers.

Before that, he established and headed the Artificial Intelligence teams in eBay, enabling the business with machine translation, language understanding and processing, computer vision, behavior modeling, dialog processing, and other fields, to improve the user experience for the shopper and seller.

Prior to joining eBay in April 2013, Hassan held management roles with several companies in the language solutions space, including CEO of AIXPLAIN AG, COO of AppTek Inc., CEO of Net2Voice, and Chief Scientist at SAIC.

Hassan speaks fluent English, German and Arabic, holds patents in the areas of machine learning, speech recognition, machine translation and computer vision and continues to be active in the Angel investor community.

He holds a Master of Science degree in computer science from Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen with a minor in Human Medicine, and attended the same university for his Ph.D. studies, focusing on Machine Learning and Applied Artificial Intelligence.