In 2022, Tariq completed his PhD in Natural Language Processing at Columbia University working under the supervision of Dr. Smaranda Muresan. He also holds a Research Affiliate position at the Center for Complex Engineering Systems (CCES) at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) and MIT. He received a bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) as well as dual masters degrees from Syracuse University in Computer Science and Engineering Management.

Since joining CCES, Tariq worked on several projects. He worked in City Schema project on detecting usability patterns of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) using machine learning techniques in order to enhance the design of such systems. In the Integrated Transit Systems project, he developed an LDA topic model of geo-tagged tweets to show spatial and temporal clusters of activity in Riyadh city. He also studied the correlation of topic clusters with demographics attributes in City Vibes project to understand relationships between contents and their producers in social media. Tariq’s interests include Natural Language Processing, Arabic Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Information Retrieval.