Askdeveloper Podcast

Bridger (Waleed) Ammar, PhD Dr. Ammar is an educator, engineer, research scientist, author, and a business owner. Before founding HIGG, Dr. Ammar was a senior research scientist at Google, where he helped develop transformer-based models for generating DNA sequences based on PacBio long-reads which significantly reduced variant-calling errors [Nature Biotech'22]. He also helped develop task-oriented dialog systems which are more robust to disfluencies, code-switching and user revisions [arXiv'23]. Prior to joining Google, Dr. Ammar led the Semantic Scholar research team's efforts to develop ML-based methods to facilitate access to the literature [e.g., NAACL 19], build a knowledge graph of the scientific literature [NAACL'18], and use this wealth of information to identify systemic social problems in science [JAMA'19]. He also led the product team for the Semantic Scholar APIs in 2023. Dr. Ammar occasionally teaches courses at UW linguistics and UW Computer Science as a visiting lecturer. In 2016, he earned