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. 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

• 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
• ECE 657 - Tools of Intelligent Systems Design
  • Taught in 2024

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

• Moraffah, Raha, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Adrienne Raglin, and Huan Liu. "Socially Responsible Machine Learning: A Causal Perspective." In Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 5819-5820. 2023.
• Karimi, Amir-Hossein, Gilles Barthe, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Isabel Valera. "A survey of algorithmic recourse: contrastive explanations and consequential recommendations." ACM Computing Surveys 55, no. 5 (2022): 1-29.
• Karimi, Amir-Hossein, Krikamol Muandet, Simon Kornblith, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Been Kim. "On the Relationship Between Explanation and Prediction: A Causal View." arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.06925 (2022).
• Karimi, Amir-Hossein, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Isabel Valera. "Algorithmic recourse: from counterfactual explanations to interventions." In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, pp. 353-362. 2021.
• Morita P.P., Rocha A.S., Shaker G., Lee D., Wei J., Fong B., Thatte A., Karimi A., Xu L., Ma A., Wong A., and Boger J., Comparative Analysis of Gait Speed Estimation Using Wideband and Narrowband Radars, Thermal Camera, and Motion Tracking Suit Tec, Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research, Volume 4, 215-237, Canada, 2020.
• Karimi, Amir-Hossein, Gilles Barthe, Borja Balle, and Isabel Valera. "Model-agnostic counterfactual explanations for consequential decisions." In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, pp. 895-905. PMLR, 2020.
• Karimi A.-H., Chung A.G., Shafiee M.J., Khalvati F., Haider M.A., Ghodsi A., and Wong A., Discovery radiomics via a mixture of deep ConvNet sequencers for multi-parametric MRI prostate cancer classification, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Volume 127, 45-53, Canada, 2017.
• Karimi A.H., Shafiee M.J., Scharfenberger C., Bendaya I., Haider S., Talukdar N., Clausi D.A., and Wong A., Spatio-temporal saliency detection using abstracted fully-connected graphical models, Proceedings - International Conference on Image Processing, ICIP, Volume 127, 694-698, Canada, 2016.
• Miller, Alexander, Adam Fisch, Jesse Dodge, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Antoine Bordes, and Jason Weston. "Key-value memory networks for directly reading documents." arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.03126 (2016).
• Karimi A.-H., Wong A., and Bizheva K., Automated detection and cell density assessment of keratocytes in the human corneal stroma from ultrahigh resolution optical coh, Biomedical Optics Express, Volume 2, 2905-2916, Canada, 2011.