Good evening everyone.

My name is Houssam Nassif, and I am happy to be able to join you tonight for the CS department annual reunion.

In my undergrad, I majored in Biology. Back then we had only 2 credits of electives. A good friend of mine, who had taken CMPS 200, recommended the course. With passion, he recounted his discovery of how stupid computers are. You have to program every single instruction to them, he said, and if you happen to omit a case, the machine will crash. That is how I took the 4 credits course to finish my BS. And I was hooked. These Turing Machines are stupid indeed, but they produce amazing results! That one introductory course changed my career path, and started me thinking of ways to confer intelligence to automata.

I switched majors and graduated from AUB in 2006 with a Masters in CS. I then completed my PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I am currently a Machine Learning Scientist at Amazon, part of the core machine learning research team here in Seattle.

I often heard complaints at AUB that CS courses are hard and require a lot of work. After you continue your graduate studies at a respectable university abroad, you will soon discover that their curriculum is even more demanding. I used to challenge myself by taking the most difficult CS courses at AUB, given by professors with the toughest reputation.

I even remember staying up all night at the lab, working on large coding projects with imminent deadlines. I narrowly escaped being caught by the security personnel, who were inspecting and locking the building, and slept on the wooden desks for a mere hour in the early morning. This happened not once, but twice.

It is these demanding courses that allowed me to withstand the PhD workload, and to succeed at one of the top-10 schools in CS. I even discussed some of my AUB projects in my job interviews, and still refer to them at my work.

In addition to preparing me academically, the connections I made in the department were also detrimental. Even after graduating, I still collaborate and publish with department professors. CS alumni are scattered throughout major companies, which helps building a far-reaching professional network. The department administration and secretary (and who doesn’t know Rima!) is very responsive and facilitates access to documents and resources.

The CS department has indeed shaped my career and success in many ways. I specifically thank Dr Jureidini for inviting me tonight, to share some of my CS stories.

Each one of us has multiple stories to tell, and more are created each day in the department. Cheers to our department, and that it may keep creating stories, and sharing them more abundantly.

Thank you all!