Commencement 2026: Speaking the language of AI

On Thursday, 7 May, MBZUAI student Lara Hassan will be among 144 master’s and doctoral students graduating as part of the University’s 2026 Commencement ceremony.

Part of the Computer Vision master’s program, Hassan’s upcoming graduation feels somewhat destined, having grown up in an environment that set the stage for an interest in science and technology from an early age – not least a career that has already spanned healthcare, large tech companies, and startups.

“I was raised in a home full of researchers,” she says, explaining that her father is a professor in the Faculty of Engineering at Alexandria in Egypt, and that her mother also works in the school.

Against that backdrop, it makes sense that Hassan has always been drawn to technical subjects – but as she explains, a deep love for languages has also shaped her academic journey. She speaks Arabic, English, French, and a bit of Spanish, and says that she has a slightly different personality when she speaks each one: “I’m a more delicate person when I speak French, and a funnier person when I speak Arabic.”

One of the great benefits of studying languages and cultures, she adds, is that doing so helps train the mind to approach the world from different perspectives. This flexibility has served her well not only when she is traveling or meeting new people, but also when she needs to come up with creative ways to solve technical problems. “My passion for languages and cultures has shaped all the tiny decisions I have made in my life, often without me noticing it,” she says.

Learning by doing

Hassan’s father is a hardware engineer who she often watched as he tinkered with circuits and the like in their home. But during her undergraduate studies at Alexandria University, she was drawn to software. This led to an opportunity to travel to the United States for an internship at the University of Louisville, where she worked on a prototype of a web-based software application for the pathology department at a university hospital.

When she began the internship, she wasn’t familiar with the fast-paced clinical setting that doctors and other clinicians work in. But the experience taught her how complex applications can be designed to serve the practical needs of users. This was before OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in the fall of 2022.

“I was able to learn so much when I was working on the project because there was no ChatGPT back then,” she says with a laugh. A later iteration of the application won first prize in a research competition, and a study about it was published in a top journal.

Hassan interned at Microsoft Egypt, focusing on a web analytics product called Microsoft Clarity. Her time with one of the world’s largest tech companies broadened her perspective and gave her insight into the mechanics of how technology corporations operate. She also had an internship at a legal technology company based in Dubai called Clara Technologies, gaining more hands-on experience with AI and techniques such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which sharpened her interest in AI.

Bridging language and vision

During her undergraduate studies, Hassan also came to Abu Dhabi for an internship at MBZUAI, where she developed an application that used natural language processing to analyze news stories. The experience encouraged her to pursue a degree in AI.

Hassan chose the master’s in Computer Science program at MBZUAI because it let her combine her interests in natural language processing and computer vision. “It gave me the opportunity to work in everything all at once because they both fall under the umbrella of algorithmic optimization,” she says.

Hassan is a member of the first cohort to graduate from the University with a master’s degree in Computer Science and is advised by Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Assistant Professor of Computer Science. The program has helped her become proficient in a variety of subjects relevant to recent developments in AI and has helped her gain more practical experience, interning as a backend engineer for ByteDance in their Dubai office. “At MBZUAI, I got so much more support than I could have expected, and I wouldn’t have gotten this experience anywhere else,” she says.

Hassan’s master’s thesis relates to an application for dermatology that uses a multimodal language model to process image and text data users provide about skin conditions. The goal of her research is to determine if the model pays more attention to the image or to the text when it analyzes inputs. “Does it really look at the image, or does it overly rely on the text,” she says. This is important because gaining a better understanding of how AI models process data will help to mitigate failures and help researchers develop more faithful models that can be trusted, she says. Mahmoud and Jianing Qiu, Assistant Professor of Personalized Medicine, supervised the thesis, and Hassan was recently interviewed by Meta about the project.

From research to the real world

Now that she has finished her master’s studies at MBZUAI, Hassan is looking forward to her role at Astra Tech, a G42 company, in Dubai. She acknowledges that the rapid pace of technological innovation of recent years can seem intimidating, but it is also the beginning of an era in which people can feel empowered because they have access to much more information today than they did in the past.

AI is becoming more democratized, and it can help people with many different tasks, whether it’s drafting emails, brainstorming new ideas, or learning a new language. “These tools can make our lives easier and make our businesses grow faster,” she says. “We just need to learn how to not get overwhelmed by the huge amount of information we have access to.”

When asked to provide advice to those who may be interested to pursue a career in AI, she says that people should pick topics that aligns with their interests. “I have a passion for building things that can help people and make their lives easier. Find topics that you are passionate about, and you will find yourself happy in your work.”