About

Background, education, teaching and experience.

Background

I am Amir Masoud Nourollah (Masoud), a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at Cardiff University, where I am part of the Cardiff NLP and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning groups. I started my PhD in 2024.

My academic background spans chemistry and computer science. I studied Chemistry (2016–2020) before moving into Computer Science, completing a Master’s degree focused on artificial intelligence and robotics (2020–2023). Since my undergraduate studies I have also worked in industry as a software engineer and machine learning researcher, across computer vision, speech processing and natural language processing.

I have explored programming languages and the GNU/Linux ecosystem for nearly two decades, and that interest in systems predates my formal studies. Alongside research, I care about engineering practice, infrastructure and open-source software.

Research Interests

  • Scientific machine learning (SciML) for chemistry and molecular systems
  • Generalisation and distribution shift in machine learning
  • Interpretability and explainability of ML models
  • Geometric deep learning and graph neural networks
  • Multimodal machine learning
  • Neural rendering & simulation

Education

2024 – present

PhD, Computer Science · Cardiff University

Supervisors: Prof. Steven Schockaert, Prof. Stefano Leoni

2020 – 2023

MSc, Computer Engineering (AI & Robotics) · Shahrood University of Technology

Supervisors: Prof. Hamid Hassanpour, Dr. Amin Zehtabian

2016 – 2020

BSc, Chemistry (Information Technology) · Islamic Azad University, Tehran North Branch

Supervisors: Prof. Saeed Abedini Khorrami, Prof. Mahmoudreza Sohrabi

Teaching

2024 – present

Graduate Demonstrator · Cardiff University

Chemistry modules CH5110, CH5210, CH5230, CH5231, CH5350

2021 – 2023

Teaching Assistant · Shahrood University of Technology

Digital Image Processing · Neural Networks and Deep Learning · Big Data and Scalable Machine Learning · Advanced Machine Learning

Research Groups

At Cardiff I am a member of the Cardiff NLP group, which works on representation learning, reasoning and language understanding, and the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning group, which studies formal and neural approaches to knowledge representation and reasoning.

During my master’s studies I was a member of the Image Processing and Data Mining group at Shahrood University of Technology, where my work centred on computer vision and applied machine learning.

Industry Experience

2023 – 2024

Machine Learning Researcher · Novin Barnameh Kara, Tehran

2021 – 2022

Machine Learning Researcher · NOVE, Tehran

2017 – 2021

Software Engineer · Faradid Payesh System

Areas covered: computer vision and image/video processing, speech and signal processing, natural language processing, steganography and information hiding, AI infrastructure and DevOps, and cross-platform native software development.

Beyond Research

Outside of research, I enjoy reading literature, philosophy and science, particularly classic works, as well as Persian poetry. I am learning French, with Spanish as a future goal. I have a background in martial arts, having trained in Muay Thai and Judo.

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