About

Abubakar Abid is a highly experienced senior machine learning engineer with over 5 years of experience in machine learning engineering and software systems design and implementation around data collection and ML model deployment. He has a strong background in leading interdisciplinary machine learning teams and is currently the Machine Learning Team Lead at Hugging Face. Abubakar is experienced in all stages of ML engineering, including research and prototyping of new methods, ML implementation in TensorFlow and PyTorch, testing and validation of ML systems, as well as communication of results to stakeholders. He has a proven track record of leading full-stack engineering teams and building Gradio, an open-source platform for rapidly building machine learning applications. Prior to his current role, Abubakar founded the Fatima Fellowship, a free 9-month international program to prepare PhD applicants from around the world for admissions into top computer science/machine learning PhD programs. He also founded Gradio, a venture-backed company that allows machine learning developers to quickly create web applications from their ML models for easy demoing and debugging. He led an interdisciplinary team of 8 ML developers and technical writers to develop open-source tools used by 18,000+ ML engineers, including teams at Cisco, Google, and Amazon. Abubakar holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Machine Learning from Stanford University, a Master of Engineering degree in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, also from MIT. He has a strong technical skill set, including expertise in ML, testing, research, TensorFlow, PyTorch, frontend and backend development, and web development. Overall, Abubakar has 1.86 years of relevant experience and is a highly skilled machine learning engineer with a proven track record of success in leading interdisciplinary teams and building innovative software systems.