Ussama Zahid is a PhD student in the Accelerated Connected Computing Lab at KAUST. He works at the intersection of deep learning and embedded systems, i.e., “Edge AI”. He specializes in efficient training and inference of quantized deep neural networks (DNNs) and hardware-software co-design of DNN accelerators.

Before joining KAUST, he was as a research engineer intern at Xilinx Research Labs, Dublin Ireland, Ireland where he worked on quantized and robust training of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), resulting in patents and publications.

He received his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan in 2019, with his thesis research undertaken at TU Kaiserslautern, Germany.  He received his Masters in Computer Science from KAUST in 2022.