About

Ali got his bachelor’s degree in physics from Sharif University of Technology (SUT) in Tehran, Iran. During his undergrad, he focused on the physics of complex systems, machine learning and computational neuroscience. He then moved to Canada to study at the University of Calgary, where he was part of the complexity science group. His supervisor had a PhD in mathematics, and had done a post-doc in computational neuroscience at University College of London, and now he was a faculty member at the department of neurology and cell biology. Quite the wild ride I would say! In his lab, there were people coming from various majors including physics, electronics engineering, computer science, and mathematics.

When Ali needed to choose his major at SUT, he was in a dilemma to choose between Computer Science and Physics. He decided to choose physics as his major and study computer science as a hobby. This led to him holding meetings with faculty members from the computer engineering department and designing a curriculum to teach algorithm design and analysis to physics students. A study group of sorts where at every session, one student would present one chapter of the textbook, with coding examples in Python and C/C++.

Since his freshman year, he started learning about the Linux operating system, and started exploring the various distros and their strengths and weaknesses. When he got his first laptop in 2018, he started installing various linux distributions on it and testing each for a few days, until he settled on Arch linux, and he has been using Arch (btw) ever since. Throuhout the years, he struggled with linux, and learned through those struggles. At the same time, he started self-learning Python, and C++. In his sophomore year, he was writing simulations in both languages.

These days, Ali spends his time, writing algorithms for reservoir computing frameworks. He has developed a framework based on PyTorch, for simulation of reservoir computing solutions. He is planning to expand this to byte code where researchers can design and simulate their reservoirs using his framework and with a single command, convert it to byte code which can be run on FPGAs and ASIC chips.

In his spare time, Ali likes to work on personal projects, create automation tools and solutions, and perform time series analysis and learn about financial mathematics.

Outside of his work, he likes to go for long walks, along the trails in Calgary and take photographs. He likes to play squash, and occasionally billiards.