University of Khartoum

Khartoum is where the foundations were laid. I studied electrical and electronic engineering with a software engineering track, which in practice meant a lot of math and a lot of building — from circuits and signals to data structures, algorithms, computer graphics, computer architecture (assembly), and cryptography. It was a broad, demanding degree, and it gave me the habit I still rely on: understand something from first principles, then build it.

Outside of coursework, I fell into competitive programming. I competed in IEEEXtreme — our team placed around 4th in Sudan and roughly 300th of 5,500+ teams worldwide — alongside the university's coding club and hackathons. Those late nights solving algorithm problems taught me to think under pressure. I stopped after university, which I regret; it's a muscle I'm rebuilding now.

This is also where I found the AI community — and started bringing others into it. With IndabaX Sudan I went from volunteer (2019) to content-team lead, organizer, and speaker (2022), and organizer again (2025) — including an "Introduction to Deep Learning with PyTorch" talk to around 200 people, some of whom went on to careers in AI. I also tutored Calculus to junior students, led the Social Affairs Committee of the Outstanding Students Congress (Almultaga), and was active in the Google Developer Student Club. I still mentor Sudanese students applying to Master's programs.

My graduation project was my first real taste of research. With Ahmed Elmahdy , Mohammed Saeed and Hiba Imam, I built neural machine translation systems for Arabic–Swahili, a low-resource pair with almost no parallel data. I studied the Transformer architecture from scratch and implemented a baseline from the ground up; then we created the data ourselves — aligning the Bible verse-by-verse into what was, at the time, the largest Arabic–Swahili parallel corpus — and fine-tuned multilingual models on top of it. The work was accepted to ICLR 2023 (Tiny Papers). Going from an idea, to a dataset, to a published paper showed me what research actually feels like.

All of this happened against an unstable backdrop in Sudan, and eventually the war — my transcript even carries a visible gap, with years lost between 2020 and 2022. Finishing took as much resilience as anything else. I still graduated First Class — earning a 9.18 / 10 in my final, specialization year — along with the Best Graduation Project award and recognition as a top student in my department. I left Khartoum with strong fundamentals, a first publication, a community I'd helped build, and the conviction to go further — which took me to AIMS.