אודות
Dr. Alaa Maalouf is the Neubauer Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Haifa, where he is the director of the GOATS Lab (Generalizable & Optimized AI for Technology and Science). He is also a Research Affiliate at MIT CSAIL, an Associate at Harvard SEAS, and a Principal Investigator with Project CETI.
Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL, working with CSAIL Director Prof. Daniela Rus. Before that, he completed his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Dan Feldman at the University of Haifa. In addition to academia, Dr. Maalouf spent five years in industry, serving as a Lead ML Researcher at Data Heroes Ltd. and as a chip-design engineer at Mellanox Technologies (now part of NVIDIA).
During his PhD and postdoctoral work, he also collaborated extensively with industry on real-world problems, including projects with Samsung Research (leading to the outstanding paper award honorable mention at NeurIPS), the Toyota Research Institute, and several startups.
His recognitions include the Israeli Council for Higher Education - MAOF award for excellent young faculty, a Neubauer Family Foundation Fellowship for young faculty, a NeurIPS Spotlight and an Oral, a NeurIPS Best Paper Honorable Mention, an Outstanding Reviewer award at CVPR, and more.
He is also a TEDx speaker.
His research focuses on efficient and generalizable AI, physical AI, world models for robots, and AI for scientific discovery.
פרסומים
- Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events, Aluma, Y., Baron, Z., Barrett, R., Baumgartner, C., Beguš, G., Bhattacharya, S., Bronstein, M. M., Dahan, S., Davis, O., de Haas, S., Defoe, J., DelPreto, J., Dessi, R., Diamant, R., Gatesy, J., George, K., Gero, S., Gibbons, D., Gibbons, D. & Gil, S. & 27 others, , Dec 2026, In: Scientific Reports. 16, 1, 9206.
- Flex: End-to-End Text-Instructed Visual Navigation From Foundation Model Features, Chahine, M., Quach, A., Maalouf, A., Wang, T. H. & Rus, D., 1 May 2026, In: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. 11, 5, p. 6480-6487 8 p.
- Cooperation by non-kin during birth underpins sperm whale social complexity, Maalouf, A., DelPreto, J., Lucas, M., Poetto, S., Andreas, J., Torralba, A., Gero, S., Petri, G., Rus, D. & Gruber, D. F., 26 Mar 2026, In: Science. 391, 6792, p. 1355-1360 6 p.
- Kernel Reboot: Breaking the Boundaries of Neural Tangent Kernels for Neural Fields, Mallak, A., Maalouf, A., Wolf, L., Rus, D. & Rosenbaum, D., 2026, (Accepted/In press) In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
- Predicting mesoscale movement of sperm whale units in the Caribbean based on social dynamics, Mevorach, Y., Maalouf, A., Gubnitsky, G., Tønnesen, P., Gruber, D. F., Rus, D., Tchernov, D. & Gero, S., Dec 2025, In: Scientific Reports. 15, 1, 39150.
- Probing Multimodal LLMs as World Models for Driving, Sreeram, S., Wang, T. H., Maalouf, A., Rosman, G., Karaman, S. & Rus, D., 2025, In: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. 10, 11, p. 11403-11410 8 p.
- A Unified Approach to Coreset Learning, Maalouf, A., Eini, G., Mussay, B., Feldman, D. & Osadchy, M., 1 May 2024, In: IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. 35, 5, p. 6893-6905 13 p.
- Follow Anything: Open-Set Detection, Tracking, and Following in Real-Time, Maalouf, A., Jadhav, N., Jatavallabhula, K. M., Chahine, M., Vogt, D. M., Wood, R. J., Torralba, A. & Rus, D., 1 Apr 2024, In: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. 9, 4, p. 3283-3290 8 p.
- Drive Anywhere: Generalizable End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Multi-modal Foundation Models, Wang, T. H., Maalouf, A., Xiao, W., Ban, Y., Amini, A., Rosman, G., Karaman, S. & Rus, D., 2024, 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2024. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., p. 6687-6694 8 p. (Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation).
- Large Scale Dataset Distillation with Domain Shift, Loo, N., Maalouf, A., Hasani, R., Lechner, M., Amini, A. & Rus, D., 2024, In: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. 235, p. 32759-32780 22 p.
- Provable Data Subset Selection For Efficient Neural Networks Training, Tukan, M., Zhou, S., Maalouf, A., Rus, D., Braverman, V. & Feldman, D., 2023, In: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. 202, p. 34533-34555 23 p.
- On the Size and Approximation Error of Distilled Sets, Maalouf, A., Hasani, R., Tukan, M., Lechner, M., Loo, N. & Rus, D., 2023, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 - 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2023. Oh, A., Neumann, T., Globerson, A., Saenko, K., Hardt, M. & Levine, S. (eds.). Neural information processing systems foundation, (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems; vol. 36).
- Deep Learning on Home Drone: Searching for the Optimal Architecture, Maalouf, A., Gurfinkel, Y., Diker, B., Gal, O., Rus, D. & Feldman, D., 2023, Proceedings - ICRA 2023: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., p. 8208-8215 8 p. (Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation; vol. 2023-May).
- AutoCoreset: An Automatic Practical Coreset Construction Framework, Maalouf, A., Tukan, M., Braverman, V. & Rus, D., 2023, In: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. 202, p. 23451-23466 16 p.
- Fast and Accurate Least-Mean-Squares Solvers for High Dimensional Data, Maalouf, A., Jubran, I. & Feldman, D., 1 Dec 2022, In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 44, 12, p. 9977-9994 18 p.
- Pruning Neural Networks via Coresets and Convex Geometry: Towards No Assumptions, Tukan, M., Mualem, L. & Maalouf, A., 2022, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 - 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2022. Koyejo, S., Mohamed, S., Agarwal, A., Belgrave, D., Cho, K. & Oh, A. (eds.). Neural information processing systems foundation, (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems; vol. 35).
- Obstacle Aware Sampling for Path Planning, Tukan, M., Maalouf, A., Feldman, D. & Poranne, R., 2022, 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., p. 13676-13683 8 p. (IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems; vol. 2022-October).
- Coresets for Data Discretization and Sine Wave Fitting, Maalouf, A., Tukan, M., Price, E., Kane, D. & Feldman, D., 2022, In: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. 151, p. 10622-10639 18 p.
- Overview of accurate coresets, Jubran, I., Maalouf, A. & Feldman, D., 1 Nov 2021, In: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. 11, 6, p. 1-18
- Coresets for the average case error for finite query sets, Maalouf, A., Jubran, I., Tukan, M. & Feldman, D., 1 Oct 2021, In: Sensors. 21, 19, 6689.
- No fine-tuning, no cry: Robust svd for compressing deep networks, Tukan, M., Maalouf, A., Weksler, M. & Feldman, D., 2 Aug 2021, In: Sensors. 21, 16, p. 5599
- Provably Approximated Point Cloud Registration, Jubran, I., Maalouf, A., Kimmel, R. & Feldman, D., 2021, Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV’21) . Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., p. 13269-13278 10 p. (Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision).
- DEEP LEARNING MEETS PROJECTIVE CLUSTERING, Maalouf, A., Lang, H., Rus, D. & Feldman, D., 2021.
- Compressing Neural Networks: Towards Determining the Optimal Layer-wise Decomposition, Liebenwein, L., Maalouf, A., Gal, O., Feldman, D. & Rus, D., 2021, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 - 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021. Ranzato, M., Beygelzimer, A., Dauphin, Y., Liang, P. S. & Wortman Vaughan, J. (eds.). Neural information processing systems foundation, p. 5328-5344 17 p. (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems; vol. 7).
- Tight Sensitivity Bounds for Smaller Coresets, Maalouf, A., Statman, A. & Feldman, D., 23 Aug 2020, KDD 2020 - Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Association for Computing Machinery, p. 2051-2061 11 p. (Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining).
- Coresets for near-convex functions, Tukan, M., Maalouf, A. & Feldman, D., 2020, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS, formerly NIPS). Vol. 2020-December. (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems).
- Sets Clustering, Jubran, I., Tukan, M., Maalouf, A. & Feldman, D., 2020, 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020. Daume, H. & Singh, A. (eds.). International Machine Learning Society (IMLS), p. 4961-4972 12 p. (37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020; vol. PartF168147-7).
- Sets Clustering, Jubran, I., Tukan, M., Maalouf, A. & Feldman, D., 2020, 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020. Daume, H. & Singh, A. (eds.). International Machine Learning Society (IMLS), p. 4961-4972 12 p. (37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020; vol. PartF168147-7).
- Sets Clustering, Jubran, I., Tukan, M., Maalouf, A. & Feldman, D., 2020, In: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. 119
- Fast and accurate least-mean-squares solvers, Maalouf, A., Jubran, I. & Feldman, D., 2019, In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 32
תחומי מחקר
- Efficient and generalizable AI.
- Physical AI.
- World models for robots.
- AI for scientific discovery (collective behavior, communication, and cooperation in natural animal systems).My work focuses on: (1) building efficient, generalizable AI that runs in real time across domains and on resource-constrained platforms to democratize access; (2) enabling intelligent robots with world models that perceive and act in the physical world robustly and in a human-like manner; and (3) using AI and robotics for scientific discovery—especially to uncover the principles underlying collective behavior, communication, and cooperation in animal societies.
פרסים
His recognitions include the Israeli Council for Higher Education - MAOF award for excellent young faculty, a Neubauer Family Foundation Fellowship, a NeurIPS Spotlight, a NeurIPS Oral, a NeurIPS Best Paper Honorable Mention, an Outstanding Reviewer award at CVPR, and more.
He is also a TEDx speaker.
He is also a TEDx speaker.