Qasim Ali

Hi! I’m Qasim Ali, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo. I am advised by Alexander Wong and Javad Shafiee.

I’m interested in building and using World Models 🌎 to help agents take better actions. While LLMs are great at solving some tasks, I think robust System 2 Reasoning 🧠 will require alternative architectures like JEPA or Neural Turing Machines. During my master’s degree, I worked at the intersection of generative models, reinforcement learning, and representation learning on ideas related to this vision.

I did a 16 month internship at Magna Electronic’s ADAS division where I worked with various embedded software platforms to help get self-driving features working on vehicles.

I come from an embedded software and robotics background, as I did my undergrad in Mechatronics Engineering. During that time I built a control algorithm for getting vehicles to navigate through V2I-connected intersections for the EcoCar Contest, and built a Drone.

If you’re into AI research, robotics, or just want to chat about the future of agents 🤖 — feel free to email me!

P.S. I’m graduating soon — if you need help training, finetuning or deploying models models, then also feel free to email me.