Ibrahim Abu Farha

I work in natural language processing (NLP), with a background in Arabic language technologies, sentiment analysis, and sarcasm detection. Over the years, my work has moved between academic research and applied engineering — building systems that bring language understanding into practical use.

I am currently an AI/ML Engineer at Qualitrol Corporation, where I work on machine learning for industrial monitoring using time-series sensor data. Before that, I was a founding member of Alsun AI, where I worked on Arabic conversational AI — voice pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation, and local language model integration.

Prior to that, I was a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, working with Kalina Bontcheva and Carolina Scarton on multilingual NLP for disinformation analysis, as part of the EU-funded VIGILANT project.

In 2023, I completed my PhD in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where I worked on Arabic sarcasm detection, supervised by Walid Magdy and Bonnie Webber. I was a member of the SMASH research group. During my PhD, I developed the ArSarcasm and ArSarcasm-v2 datasets and co-organised SemEval-2022 Task 6 (iSarcasmEval) — the first shared task on intended sarcasm detection in English and Arabic.

In 2018, I completed my MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on machine learning and NLP. I hold a Bachelor of Computer Systems Engineering from Birzeit University, Palestine, where I graduated as Valedictorian.