Nesreen K. Ahmed

    Senior Principal AI Scientist and Systems Architect


  • 100+ Publications · 15,000+ Citations

    • CV  |  Google Scholar  |  LinkedIn  |  GitHub

    I am a Senior Principal AI Scientist and Systems Architect at Cisco AI Research (Outshift), where I lead research in agentic AI, large language models, and multi-agent systems, spanning reasoning, planning, memory, evaluation, observability, security, and enterprise AI automation. Prior to Cisco, I spent nearly a decade at Intel Labs leading research in AI for programming systems, code generation and translation, compiler optimization, graph learning, and large-scale machine learning systems.

    I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science and M.S. degrees in Computer Science and Statistics from Purdue University. Over my career, I have worked across academia and industry, including research appointments and visiting researcher positions at Meta, Adobe Research, Technicolor Research, and Intel Labs.

    My research spans large-scale machine learning, generative and agentic AI, graph representation learning, knowledge graph reasoning, personalization, and AI for systems. More recently, I have focused on the foundations of autonomous AI systems, including multi-agent coordination, reasoning and planning, agent security, observability, evaluation, and Theory-of-Mind reasoning for intelligent agents.

    I have authored more than 100 publications with over 15,000 citations and hold 14 patents spanning agentic AI, AI-driven software optimization, large-scale machine learning, and autonomous systems. My work has appeared in leading venues including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, WWW, SIGKDD, and AAAI, and has been featured by organizations such as MIT Technology Review.

    Beyond research, I contribute to the AI community through conference leadership, editorial service, and international research initiatives. I served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS) and have held leadership roles at SIGKDD, CIKM, IEEE Big Data, GrAPL (IEEE IPDPS), and Dagstuhl Seminars.

    Selected Honors

    • Rising Stars in Computer Science and Engineering, UC Berkeley (2014)
    • Multiple Intel Labs Recognition Awards (2019–2022)
    • Best Paper and Outstanding Paper Awards across AI, systems, and high-performance computing venues

    I am always interested in discussing research collaborations, speaking opportunities, and emerging directions in AI systems and agentic intelligence.

    Erdos Number 3 --- (Nesreen Ahmed -> Nick Duffield -> Noga Alon -> Paul Erdos).