Ziad El Sayed

About Me

I am an AI researcher and engineer based in London, with an MSc in Machine Learning from University College London, awarded with distinction, and a BSc in Computer Science from NYU Abu Dhabi. My work has been published in ACM Computing Surveys and ACL SRW.

I am currently most interested in studying and mitigating demographic-based bias in machine learning systems, and in the growing presence of these systems in mental health and well-being.

Research Interests

Broadly, I am interested in the social consequences of AI systems. I also work on technical questions in interpretability, memory, and representation. Please feel free to reach out if any of this resonates.

News

  • Mar. 2026

    Gave an invited talk at Koç University’s KUIS AI Center on OMem, my work on long-term memory for LLM agents

  • Nov. 2025

    Started at Sadel Group in London as an AI Engineer

  • Oct. 2025

    My first-author survey on graph neural networks for hardware design, security, and reliability is out in ACM Computing Surveys!

  • Sep. 2025

    Represented Oxtractor at Google Cloud’s CTO Connect with DeepMind in London

  • Sep. 2025

    Finished my MSc in Machine Learning at UCL, graduating with distinction

  • Jul. 2025

    Our paper FaithfulSAE was accepted to the ACL 2025 Student Research Workshop

  • Mar. 2025

    Joined Oxtractor, an Oxford University Innovation venture, to work on memory retrieval for real-time agentic systems

  • Jan. 2025

    Started working on mechanistic interpretability at UCL, on the faithfulness of sparse autoencoders

  • May. 2024

    Graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi with a BSc in Computer Science and minors in Applied Mathematics and Business Studies

  • May. 2024

    Presented my research on multimodal and demographic-based bias mitigation at the NYU Abu Dhabi Capstone Festival

  • Mar. 2024

    Awarded over $3,400 to spend the summer researching ML for hardware security at NYU

  • Apr. 2023

    Returned to the NYUAD Hackathon for Social Good as an organiser

  • May. 2022

    Served as a teaching assistant for Language of Computers (CADT-UH 1013), an introductory programming course at NYU Abu Dhabi

  • Apr. 2022

    My team won Best Application of Social Good at the NYUAD Hackathon for Social Good with qSa’id, a hybrid quantum-classical ML platform that hit 95.1% accuracy screening for autism

Selected Publications

  1. Flow diagram: an input circuit netlist is converted to a graph, passed through GNN layers to produce an embedding, then through linear layers to downstream EDA, hardware reliability and hardware security tasks.

    Graph Neural Networks for Integrated Circuit Design, Reliability, and Security: Survey and Tool

    Ziad El Sayed, Zeng Wang, et al.

    ACM Computing Surveys, 58(4), 1-44, 2025

  2. Grouped bar chart of fake feature ratio across seven language models, from GPT2-small to LLaMA 8B, comparing sparse autoencoders trained on the Faithful, Pile and Fineweb datasets.

    FaithfulSAE: Towards Capturing Faithful Features with Sparse Autoencoders without External Datasets Dependency

    Seonglae Cho, et al., including Ziad El Sayed

    Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop, 297-314, 2025