My name is Haytham ElFadeel. I am a founder, self-taught machine learning scientist, engineering executive, and former alpine climber and cyclist.
From 2009 to 2017, I founded and led Kngine Inc., which aimed to solve the challenge of automatic knowledge acquisition, representation, and comprehension - basically ChatGPT before the GPT. My work focused on open-domain question answering, web-scale knowledge extraction, organization and representation, and natural language understanding.
In 2016, we built one of the precursors to BERT/GPT - a large foundational model that could answer questions. In 2017, Kngine Inc. was acquired by Samsung.
Before founding Kngine, I contributed to diverse research areas, including online handwriting recognition for Arabic, multilingual named entity recognition (NER), multi-kernel operating systems, and the development of a parallelism SDK for programmers.
From 2017 to 2020, following Kngine's acquisition, I led a research organization at Samsung Research as a Director, focusing on natural language understanding, open-domain question answering, and machine translation.
From 2020 to 2022, I worked at Meta as a Machine Learning Scientist and Senior Engineering Manager, leading multi-team organization and contributing to advancements in LLM, machine comprehension, and natural language understanding.
From 2022 to 2024, I served as a Senior Engineering Manager at Cruise (autonomous vehicles), where I led a organization responsible for:
- Agent Simulation - model agent behavior, generating controllable and diverse road-user behavior in simulation.
- Scenario Generation - using ML (e.g., Diffusion, GPT) to generate scenarios for uncovering AV issues and training the AV policy.
- Applied Research - focused on the intersection of computer vision, simulation, and reinforcement learning (e.g., RLHF/RLVR, Noise Modeling, end-to-end perception, NeRF, 3D skeletons and animation).
- Behavior Modeling - model ego behavior (planning) responsible for generating controllable and safe behavior.
After Cruise, I took a research sabbatical, conducting research in advanced MLLMs/LLMs and exploring topics such as autonomous agents, reasoning in LLMs, sample efficiency in reinforcement learning, the credit assignment problem, and some fringe topics in representation learning. Recently, I joined Motional as a Director, leading the Behavior organization.
Outside of my professional endeavors. I was a semi-professional cyclist from 2015 to 2020 and a semi-professional alpine climber from 2020 to 2025 - with more than 10 successful summits, including (Everest, Denali, Ama Dablam, and Manaslu).
Climbing Photos (from 2020 to 2024):
Everest - 2025:
Ama Dablam - 2024:
