Khaled S. Refaat

Senior

Khaled Refaat

About Me

I am a senior staff research scientist and tech lead manager at Waymo. I received my PhD in Computer Science from UCLA where I was a member of the Automated Reasoning Group advised by Prof. Adnan Darwiche. My doctoral dissertation introduced decomposition techniques to learn probabilistic graphical models from data more efficiently. I was honored to receive the Northrop-Grumman Outstanding Research Award. Before UCLA, I visited LAAS-CNRS France where I enjoyed working with Dr. Pierre Emmanuel Hladik on stochastic analysis of real-time systems. Before that, I completed a Masters in computer engineering at Cairo University Egypt where I was extremely lucky to work with Prof. Amir Atiya. I was also a teaching assistant and a part-time research engineer at IBM.

Last Announcement

Research Openings: Email me a copy of your resume or apply directly on waymo.com.

News

Two new papers are accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

January 2023

A new paper is accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

January 2022

A new paper is accepted to NeurIPS, Deep RL Workshop 2021.

October 2021

I am serving as a Senior PC member for IJCAI 2020.

September 2020

I am serving as a PC member for AAAI 2020.

September 2020

I filed 11 patents on self-driving cars.

September 2020

A new paper is accepted to IROS 2019.

June 2019

I served as a PC member for IJCAI 2019.

December 2018

I gave a talk on self-driving cars at UCLA.

January 2018

I am serving as a PC member for IJCAI 2018.

November 2017

Waymo annouced the first self-driving fleet in the world: video.

November 2017

I gave a talk on deep learning at UCLA.

November 2016

A new paper is accepted for plenary presentation at UAI 2015.

May 2015

I won the Northrop-Grumman Outstanding Research Award.

May 2015

I defended my thesis.

April 2015

A new paper is accepted to IJCAI 2015.

April 2015

The slides of the ITA talk are now available here.

February 2015

I gave a graduation day talk at ITA.

January 2015

I am teaching cs32 this quarter.

January 2015

A new paper is accepted to NIPS 2014.

September 2014

I received a Student Ambassador honorarium from UCLA.

February 2014

A new paper is accepted to NIPS 2013.

September 2013

I received a masters from UCLA.

Jan 2013

I am a winner of the first Procter & Gamble Graduate Seminar competition at UCLA.

November 2012

A new paper is accepted to the Big Learning NIPS workshop 2012.

November 2012

A new paper is accepted as an oral presentation at UAI 2012. Oral acceptance rate: 7.8%

June 2012

EDML was presented in SoCaML 2011.

September 2011

A new paper is accepted to UAI 2011.

July 2011

Experience

  • December 2016-present

    Senior Staff Research Scientist, Self-Driving Cars

    Waymo, California

  • June 2015-December 2016

    Researcher, Self-Driving Cars

    Google X, California

  • June-September 2014

    Research Intern

    Google, London

  • June-September 2013

    Software Engineering Intern

    Google, Zurich

  • June-September 2012

    Research Intern

    Google, Mountain View

  • June-September 2011

    Software Engineering Intern

    Google, Santa Monica

  • May-October 2009

    Research Intern

    LAAS-CNRS, France

Research

My research interests are in:

  • machine learning
  • automated reasoning
  • optimization

I am particularly interested in the design and analysis of highly efficient and accurate deep models which are trained using supervised, reinforcement or imitation learning. On the practical side, I focus on the development of efficient and theoretically sound reasoning algorithms that can work in real-time.

Contact

krefaat at cs.ucla.edu
  • 4801 Boelter Hall
  • University of California
  • Los Angeles, CA 90095-1596