Research Database Manager and Senior Analyst at @ICARDA interested in #DataScience, #AI, #RStats, #PHP and #Arabic Language. Views are my own.

Cairo, Egypt
Joined April 2009
Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
In @Nature this week, our new research shows how machine learning can improve weather forecasts two to six weeks out, a timeframe that's historically been very difficult to predict. It's exciting to see the potential of this work to help us better prepare for extreme weather, manage natural resources, and make more informed decisions in agriculture. There's a broader lesson here... the future may not just be about ever-more-capable models, but about building intelligent verification systems around them: systems that learn where models are systematically wrong, reason about cause and effect, and continuously calibrate predictions against reality. Read more: microsoft.com/en-us/research…
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
RustGIS is now on the Microsoft Store! On Windows 10 and 11, you can now install RustGIS from the Microsoft Store in one click. No installer to download, no security warnings, and the Store keeps it up to date with each new release. What you get - The full desktop app: the ribbon, panes, map view, attribute table, geoprocessing tools and the AI Assistant. - Open data, built in: search STAC catalogs, Planetary Computer, Overture Maps, Source Cooperative, OpenStreetMap and other open-data portals. - Cloud-native formats read in place: GeoParquet, FlatGeobuf and cloud-optimised GeoTIFFs open by their web address. - The command line too: rustgis-cli is ready in your terminal as soon as the app is installed. - Free and open source, with no sign-up needed. Get it - Microsoft Store: apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p… - Or from a terminal: winget install OpenGeos.RustGIS - Not on Windows? Launch the web app: web.rustgis.app - Other downloads: downloads.rustgis.app - Documentation: rustgis.app - GitHub: github.com/opengeos/RustGIS #GIS #Rust #OpenSource #Geospatial #Windows #MicrosoftStore #OpenData
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Jais 3: First adaption of K2 Horizon Jais 3 is built on K2 Horizon, our six-fleet fully open model family. Stronger in Arabic at every size, without starting from scratch. Plus Jais Speech, the most accurate open Arabic ASR. Download weights now: huggingface.co/collections/I…
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
From Lebanon to the Arctic 🌱 On 13 October, ICARDA deposited 2,039 seed samples representing 177 species from its Lebanon genebank at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, strengthening global efforts to safeguard crop diversity for future generations. 🔗 Read the full story: icarda.org/media/blog/protec… With thanks to NordGen, the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the Crop Trust, and the CGIAR Genebank Network. 📸 Crop Trust #WorldFoodDay
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Introducing Jais 3, Arabic-native agentic AI. Jais 3 375B matches the best open models, and with Jais Speech offers the most advanced Arabic AI stack available. → Hugging Face: huggingface.co/collections/I… → Technical blog (Jais 3): ifm.ai/blog/jais3 → Technical blog (Jais Speech): ifm.ai/blog/jais-asr → Learn more: ifm.ai/jais/ Jais 3 was created by the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) at MBZUAI, in collaboration with Inception42 and Cerebras Systems. #Jais3 #IFM #MBZUAI
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
بدأت من فترة كورس كامل لبناء LLM من الصفر . محاولة مني لسد فجوة كبيرة في اتقان هذه التقنيات. الكورس 17 ساعة. أصدرنا 4 محاضرات حتى الآن, آخرها أساسيات الـ PyTorch اللازمة لشخص لم يستخدم المكتبة من قبل, و تجهيزه قبل لبناء الـ Transformers youtube.com/watch?v=pQ1V_Upd… ..
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
In our latest blog post, @alexdaubois shares how the PHP Security Team operates, how your security reports are triaged, and how you can do your part to help PHP be more secure. thephp.foundation/blog/2026/… #phpc #security
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أفريقيا تستعد لاستعادة هدير الفورمولا 1 رواندا تحتضن عودة البطولة إلى القارة باتفاق لعشرة أعوام، بدءاً من 2030 على أقرب تقدير… #فورمولا1 #F1
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
Syria is where ICARDA’s journey began. It’s also where it continues. With support from Japan, we’re helping rebuild Syria’s seed system. 25 seed professionals from across the country have been trained. Now we’re mapping what’s still standing, what was lost, and what needs to come back first. What this means? 🌾 For farmers: improved varieties, quality seed, on time. 🏛️ For Syria’s institutions: the ability to produce, test, certify and distribute seed again. 🔬 For ICARDA: a scientific partnership with Syria that stretches back decades, and keeps going. Read the story 👇 icarda.org/media/news/seeds-…
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
Electricity production is the best metric for the true strength of any large-scale economy imo
Energy capacity = economic capacity, in one chart There are no low electricity, rich countries
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
Replying to @googlechrome
@googlechrome 154 can now adjust the size an iframe to its content with one line of CSS: iframe { frame-sizing: content-height; } I wrote about it: alfy.blog/2026/10/09/iframe-… @ChromiumDev
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
You can now train your own Decision model with our free notebook! 💡 Qwen3.5-4B will generate decisions instead of text on just 8GB VRAM locally. Learn to data prep (state, questions, gold answers), train, serve. Notebook: colab.research.google.com/gi… Guide: unsloth.ai/docs/basics/train…
You can now train your own Decision model like Jev locally! We increased Qwen3.5 0.8B’s aggregate accuracy from 20.7% to 74.3% across 3 decision benchmarks - on just 4GB VRAM. Turn any LLM like Qwen3.8, Gemma 4 into decision models with our open-source Unsloth repo. We fine-tuned with a Clef head using Unsloth and LoRA (r=64) for one epoch, increasing downstream accuracy from 30–37% to 78%. GitHub: github.com/unslothai/unsloth Guide and Notebooks: unsloth.ai/docs/basics/train…
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
Windows now has sandboxing! Microsoft released an open-source repo, mxc, for sandboxed code execution. We collaborated with Windows to add mxc OS level sandboxing to Unsloth which adds just <100 ms of overhead. GitHub: github.com/unslothai/unsloth Guide: unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio/s…
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
Google releases EmbeddingGemma 2, a new open model that runs locally on 0.5GB RAM. The 740M parameter Apache 2.0 model combines a 270M text model with vision (170M) + audio (300M). Run & train the model via Unsloth. GGUF: huggingface.co/unsloth/embed… Guide: unsloth.ai/docs/models/embed…
Meet EmbeddingGemma 2, our first natively multimodal open model for on-device embeddings. It expands beyond text to unify code, images, audio, and video in a shared space. 🧵
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
water is transparent only within a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, so living organisms evolved sensitivity to that band, and that's what we now call "visible light".
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
A speech model can support Arabic and still struggle with local dialects. Fine-tuning NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 ASR cut word error rate on Najdi and Hijazi Saudi Arabic from 55% to 30%. Check out our new tutorial and learn how to adapt it for other dialects and languages: nvda.ws/4hYqGPM
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
Andrej Karpathy
@karpathyOct 2
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks: Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better: Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better: Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better: Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work! In summary: - As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding. - Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
ollama
@ollamaSep 30
Ollama now supports Jev-like decision models all locally. Use decision models like Nimble for tasks like ticket triaging, model routing, and content moderation. ollama pull nimble Here’s Nimble playing Ollama racer through the new local /v1/systemone API by making decisions in real-time. 🏎️
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Khaled Al-Shamaa retweeted
A fine-tuned model can outperform frontier models and be cheaper and faster to run. Literally, every company I've met wants this. I want you to see these results from fine-tuning Qwen3 4B on AWS. It smokes both the out-of-the-box model and Claude Sonnet 4.6.
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