Amir-Hossein Karimi

Dr. Amir-Hossein Karimi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute. He is also the Val O'Donovan Chair in Trustworthy AI. Before joining Waterloo, he gained extensive industry experience at Meta, Google Brain, and DeepMind, and provided AI consulting services to various startups and incubators.

Dr. Karimi’s research aims to advance the field of artificial intelligence while fostering trustworthy human-AI collaboration. His work explores AI systems that can recover from or amend poor decisions, evaluates AI safety, factuality, and ethics to build trust, and investigates effective ways to combine human and machine strengths. His research spans the intersection of causal inference, explainable AI, and program synthesis.

His work has been featured at leading AI and ML conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, AISTATS, ACM-FAccT, and ACM-AIES. Dr. Karimi has received recognition for his contributions to algorithmic recourse through spotlight and oral presentations, a book chapter, and a well-regarded survey paper published in ACM Computing Surveys.

• Artificial intelligence

• Machine learning

• Explainable AI

• Causal inference

• Algorithmic Recourse

• Counterfactual Explanations

• Program Synthesis

• Human-Machine Teaming

• Human-Machine Collaboration

• 2023, Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

• 2018, Masters of Mathematics, Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

• 2015, Bachelor's Degree, Engineering Science, University of Toronto, Canada

• Igor Ivkovic Teaching Excellence Award (2024), University of Waterloo

• ETH Zurich Medal (2023)

• Google PhD fellowship (2021)

• NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship (2018)

• Alumni Gold Medal Award (2018), University of Waterloo

• Spirit of Engineering Science Award (2015), University of Toronto

• ECE 457B - Fundamentals of Computational Intelligence
  • Taught in 2024, 2025
• ECE 657 - Tools of Intelligent Systems Design
  • Taught in 2024, 2025

* Only courses taught in the past 5 years are displayed.

• New O’Donovan Chairs to lead AI research in trust and safety