Rashid Alyassi

Rashid Alyassi received his Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and his Master's degree in Computer Science from Khalifa University in 2017 and 2021, respectively. During his studies, he focused on automation, safe path planning, and designing an automated intersection for autonomous and human-driven vehicles.

Rashid held positions in both industry and academia. As an Information Security Engineer at Thuraya Satellite Telecom (2017-2018), he specialized in safeguarding sensitive data and ensuring network integrity. His role as a research engineer at Khalifa University (2021-2022) involved integrating his theoretical work into physical robots. As a research assistant at New York University (2022-2023), he designed an NLP model with researchers from Wikipedia to detect textual errors in Wikipedia articles. Rashid was a visitor at MIT's MERS Lab (2019) and the University of Oxford's DRS Lab (2022), engaging in autonomation-related research problems. His notable achievements include securing first place at the Dubai Self-Driving Transport Challenge in 2021 ($100,000 prize) and publishing seven conference and journal papers.

Rashid joined the SCAI Lab in October 2023 as a doctoral student where his research focuses on learning-based approaches for autonomous navigation in wheelchairs by approaching the problem from a reinforcement learning abstraction while incorporating shared control with a user and navigation safety policies.