In Memory of Hassana
A grandmother's wisdom. A founder's promise.
My grandmother Hassana was one of the sweetest people you'd ever meet. She never forgot a birthday or special occasion. She would always listen more than she spoke, and she made anyone in her presence feel valued, validated, and cared for. She never judged anyone as lazy or incompetent but tried to root-cause the reasoning behind why they might feel that way. She could turn a derelict house into a home by organizing it meticulously, never complaining about her luck or the cards she was dealt.
She had such a deep love of learning despite never going to high school. She would recount facts, stories, and books with precision and meticulous adherence to detail while making it all look effortless. She taught me mathematics, taught me Quran, and I was lucky to have grown up under her tutelage.
When she died, I felt a hollowness in her absence because I knew that those qualities I loved about her were now missing from the world. I understood that to still have her as part of my life, I would have to let those qualities live on through my actions.
And that's where machine learning comes in.
I've been in the field for over ten years, and I've seen how much everyone wants to get involved. But unfortunately, I've also witnessed significant barriers to entry, especially facing those who hail from underrepresented communities without the notability or money to land degrees from expensive universities, or without the contacts to get industry referrals.
Seeing so much ambition crash against manufactured difficulty is heartbreaking. Science isn't meant to be gatekept, and dreams shouldn't die because you were born disadvantaged.
In 2025, I called for open contributions from underrepresented researchers around the world, and together we co-wrote papers that changed how we look at hallucinations. Our GitHub tool Strawberry amassed 1.6k stars in four months. We secured funding from Microsoft and Google, and set up collaborations with the University of Oxford and Cambridge. We've been invited to give careers workshops around the world, including in the UK, Lebanon, and Thailand. Our coaching and online workshops have helped thousands land new jobs and secure master's and PhD offers by teaching them what we learned through iterating between 90% failure and 10% figuring it out alone.
My grandma never went to high school, but she taught me that learning has no gates.
Now I'm trying to make sure nobody else finds one either.
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