Dr. Ashqar is an assistant professor at Arab American University and adjunct faculty of AI at Columbia University . He is also a Scholar Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA and a collaborating researcher with Stanford University Natural Language Processing group on translation with LLMs for low-resource languages including Arabic. He has 12+ years of local and international experience as a program manager, technical advisor, and business developer with a primary focus on AI, Large Language Models, Natural Language Processing, Data Science, Deep Learning and their applications on Climate Change, Smart Cities, Economic Development, and Advanced Transportation and Energy Technology.. He has honed his ability to quickly familiarize himself with the technical content and challenges in new fields to find robust solutions. He has identified promising opportunities for technological and public policy advancements. His experience includes being a technical advisor and project manager for programs with over $50 million value in AI and advanced technologies at U.S. DOE’s ARPA-E. He was able to establish federal work for a firm landing more than five significant projects in less than two years.
Academic Experience
| From | To | Present | Position | Institution | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10/09/2023 | Assistant Professor | Arab American University | |||
| 01/08/2019 | 30/06/2022 | Adjunct Professor | University of Maryland Baltimore County | My role includes teaching graduate courses toward master degree in Data Science, developing and managing the class syllabus and ensuring that the syllabus meets department and college standards, planning and creating lectures, in-class discussions, and assignments, reporting student learning outcomes, class reviews, and analyzing student data, collaborating with colleagues on course curriculum, advising students on how to be successful and achieve goals, staying updated on innovations and changes within their course field, and participating in professional development activities. | |
| 01/01/2022 | 30/06/2022 | Adjunct Professor | An-Najah National University | Adjunct Professor for Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. This course will introduce the fundamental concepts and techniques used to design and build intelligent computer systems. A particular focus will be on the statistical and decision-theoretic modeling paradigm. Students will be able to build autonomous agents that can efficiently make decisions in fully informed, partially observable, and adversarial environments. The constructed software agents are capable of performing intelligently by either accomplishing computation, e.g., searching, or by drawing inferences by learning from data. Students will understand what supervised machine learning algorithms are and how they can be employed in classifying handwritten digits and photographs. The techniques you learn in this course apply to a wide variety of artificial intelligence problems and will serve as the foundation for further study in any application area you choose to pursue. | |
| 01/06/2019 | 01/06/2020 | Adjunct Faculty | Columbia University | Adjunct Faculty Associate for Capstone Project: Solving Real World Problems with Analytics. The course serves as the capstone project for the Master of Science in Applied Analytics degree. As an industry-driven project, the capstone requires synthesis of program content applied to real-world challenges to apply the leadership, strategic management, communication and modern analytics core coursework to industry-sponsored analytics projects. Working in teams and with faculty, students critically assess a company’s real-world data challenges and opportunities, formulate a problem definition, derive insights, and develop an integrated data-savvy analytics plan and solution. The project helps students develop and apply the technical, leadership, and communication skills required to identify and implement solutions/approaches. | |
| 01/01/2016 | 01/01/2018 | Research Fellow | National Science Foundation | ||
| 01/08/2015 | 01/06/2018 | Doctoral Researcher | Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) | ||
| 01/09/2013 | 28/02/2015 | Researcher | Center for Territory, Environment and Construction (CTAC) - University of Minho |
Administrative Experience
| From | To | Present | Position | Institution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01/02/2021 | Consultant/Business Lead and Developer/Data Scientist | Precision Systems, Inc. | ||
| 01/08/2018 | 01/02/2021 | Lead Technical Specialist/Project Manager | Booz Allen Hamilton | |
| 01/09/2018 | 01/02/2021 | Technical Advisor | US Department of Energy - The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) | |
| 01/06/2018 | 01/08/2018 | Senior Transportation Engineer | Intelligent Automation, Inc. |
Education
| University/College Name | Degree Received | Specialization | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virginia Tech | PhD | Civil Engineering - Applications of AI on Smart Cities | |
| Virginia Tech | Graduate Certificate | Two Graduate Certificates in Data Science and Economic Development. | |
| University of Minho | MSc | Urban Engineering - Road Infrastructure | |
| An-Najah National University | BSc | Civil Engineering - Transportation |
Skills
Data Science and Analysis, Programming Languages: Python, R, MATLAB, SAS, SPSS, C++, Transportation Simulation: INTEGRATION, QueensOD, VISSIM, VISTRO, VISUM, CORSIM, HCS, Synchro/SimTraffic, PASSER, SIDRA, TransModeler/CAD, MATSim , Design and Analysis: ArcGIS, Arena, MicroStation, AutoCAD Civil 3D, 3D Max Design
Awards
1st place in the IEEE UAS4T competition, Virginia Tech, USA, 2020., National Science Foundation Fellowship, Virginia Tech, USA, 2016 – 2018., Erasmus Mundus Scholarship, University of Minho, Portugal, 2013 – 2015., An-Najah National University’s Honor List, An-Najah National University, Palestine, 2013., Civil Engineering Department’s Award, An-Najah National University, Palestine, 2013.
Languages
Arabic
English
English
Courses Taught
| Course Title | Level |
|---|---|
| Machine Learning | Graduate |
| Natural Language Processing (NLP) | Graduate |
| Introduction to Data Science | Graduate |
| Research Methods | Graduate |