Qasim Ali

Hi! I’m Qasim Ali, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo studying AI. I am advised by Alex Wong and Javad Shafiee in the Systems Engineering Department.

I’m interested in building and using World Models 🌎 to help agents take better actions. While LLMs are great at solving simple tasks, I think 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 come from an embedded software and robotics background. I did my undergrad in Mechatronics Engineering from McMaster University and interned at Magna Electronic’s ADAS division. During that time I worked with various embedded software platforms to help get self-driving features working real-time on vehicles, built a control algorithm for getting vehicles to navigate through V2I-connected intersections, and built a drone.

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

P.S. I’m graduating soon — if you’re looking for people in AI who can train, finetune or deploy models, then feel free to contact me.