Bio:

Mahnoor Shahid is a PhD candidate, specializing in Neuro Symbolic AI, focused on developing the Next-Gen AI that reasons with common sense and understanding.

Her academic journey began with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from N.E.D University, Pakistan. She then pursued a Master's in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Saarland University, Germany.

Mahnoor has a strong background in software development, data analytics, and digital transformation, with 3 years of experience. She further honed her research skills by working as a Research Assistant at DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, for 2 years. Currently, she is part of the Chair of Information Systems and Sustainable Supply Chain Management, where she is involved in AI/ML related projects.

Her research interests extend beyond specific applications. She previously conducted research in the fields of Natural Language Processing, Language Models, and Energy Disaggregation, under the umbrella of Transfer Learning and Domain Adaptation to understand and investigate the problem of generalization in machine learning. Additionally, she has sparked an interest in Machine Learning Privacy, a critical area for ensuring responsible AI development.

Her current research revolves around enabling common sense reasoning within AI systems by tackling the symbol grounding problem with neuro-symbolic AI, aiming to create explainable, adaptable, and compositional AI architectures.

Curriculum Vitae:

Academic

2020-2023 Saarland University, Germany

Masters Degree in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

2014-2017 NED University, Pakistan

Bachelors Degree in Computer Science

Work Experience

Since 2023 University of Duisburg-Essen

2021-2023 Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)
Research Assistant at the Department of Agents and Simulated Reality (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Philipp Slusallek)

2020 Pakistan Automation
Digital Transformation Manager

2020 Sybrid Private Limited - A Lakson Group of Company
Data Analyst

2018 - 2020 Techlogix Pvt. Ltd.
Software Developer

Fields of Research:

• Generativity, Generalization, and Generative AI 
• Neuro Symbolic AI
• Symbol Grounding
• Natural Language Processing and Language Models
• Compositional Generalization
• Domain Adaptation
• Machine Learning Privacy

Publications:

• Shahid, Mahnoor; Koch, Mark; Schneider, Niklas: Paint it Black: Generating paintings from text descriptions. In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.08808 (2023). CitationDetails
• Shahid, Mahnoor: Machine Learning for Detection and Mitigation of Web Vulnerabilities and Web Attacks. In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.14451 (2023). CitationDetails
• Khan, Shahrukh; Shahid, Mahnoor; Singh, Navdeeppal: BERT Probe: A python package for probing attention based robustness evaluation of BERT models. In: Software Impacts, Vol 13 (2022), p. 100310. CitationDetails
• Khan, Shahrukh; Shahid, Mahnoor: Joint learn: A python package for task-specific weight sharing for sequence classification. In: Software Impacts, Vol 13 (2022), p. 100317. CitationDetails