About me

            My name is Firas Al - Hindawi, I was born in Amman, Jordan. I'm a Data Scientist with a background in Industrial Engineering. I enjoy getting insights from data to find a solution for a real world problem whether it was a technical, managerial or a social problem. There is a famous quote by the Machine Learning scientist Andrew Ng that says “Artificial Intelligence is the new electricity”. Ever since I have heard this sentence it resonated in my mind and inspired me to explore Machine Learning. If Artificial Intelligence (AI) truly is the new electricity, then what a great time it is to be alive! knowing that we are witnessing the rise of a life changing technology is extremely exciting. I surely do not want to miss out on the opportunity of using this new electricity to enhance the life of human beings for years and years to come. I hope I get to take part in innovating what would be considered as the next light bulb. 

As for hobbies, I'm a huge fan of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), high level Boxing and combat sports in general. Working out is a major stress reliever for me and a great way to refocus my mind and keep it off of distractions. I also enjoy hiking (at least whenever my knees feel like allowing it). I would like to list skiing as a hobby, but I only tried it once ... I would definitely practice it regularly however if I was living in a snowy environment. 

Education

            I have graduated from the university of Jordan with a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering. I was able to complete my five year program in only four while maintaining a GPA of 3.48/4.00 and ranked 11th of my class of 199 students (top 6%). Afterwards, I was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to pursue an MS degree in Industrial Engineering at Arizona State University where I have graduated with a GPA of 3.96/4.00. Currently, I'm pursuing a PhD in Data Science, Analytics, and Engineering at ASU under the supervision of professor Teresa Wu with a current GPA of 4.00/4.00.

I post most of the courses projects that I worked on during my studies on the projects section of this website, definitely go check them out if you want to learn more about my work during my studies or simply click on this link: https://www.firashindawi.com/projects

Professional Experience

            My professional experience is a very interesting mix of  technical, managerial, academic research and educational  experience. My career started with an eight-weeks internship at an international audit and management consultancy named PKF. Afterwards, I worked for two years as a Design Engineer at an international HVAC equipment manufacturer named Petra Engineering Industries. I was responsible for the sheet metal design and the final 3D design assembly of one of the company’s main products, which is the Air Handling Unit (AHU) using the CAD software SolidWorks. This job enabled me to understand the flow of products in production lines, and the processes of assembly and manufacturing required to transform a design into a reality. After two years at Petra, I decided to look for a new career challenge. While I was searching for my next career challenge, I wanted to expand my knowledge through online learning. Inspired by how my direct manager in Petra used to automate excel tasks using VBA (visual basic for applications), I started learning Excel VBA to automate excel tasks and started learning VB.Net to create desktop applications. I also explored other topics such as 3D printing, robotics, new CAD software and Arduino micro-controllers programming.

Afterwards, I got the opportunity to Join an international Aviation company called Air Arabia as an Intern Planning Engineer, where I took part in several tasks, such as Defect reporting using Computerized Maintenance Program (CMP), Assist in department forecasting and the Development and control of aircraft documentation and update Tech Logs.

Then, I got the opportunity to join the German Jordanian University (GJU) as a Research and Teaching Assistant. By far this has been the most exciting job I have ever had. The teaching experience has been very fulfilling, and it really is self-rewarding. The back and forth questions with students makes one notice things from a different point of view, thus increasing the depth of knowledge regarding the topic being taught. I took part in the teaching process of several laboratories, such as: Industrial Automation, Manufacturing Processes, Materials Science & Mechanics and The Engineering Workshop. The research part of my job is not of less importance, I have taken part in conducting Research papers and assisting students in their graduation project. Moreover, I keep trying to come up with ways to ease the education process, I have designed a proctoring system based on google sheets query and designed an android app that connects to it so that it is easier for lecturers and proctors to monitor information related to their exams. Furthermore, I have used Excel VBA to Automate the grading procedure of several reports to ease the grading process for the Teaching Assistants.

During my time at GJU, I wanted to dive deeper into Machine Learning and Data Science; hence, I started an online Machine Learning & Data Science internship with a hybrid healthcare company dedicated for women health called Nabta Health. I had the opportunity to work under the supervision of their CTO who's a highly experienced machine learning scientist where I was assigned to a project focusing on building a chat bot for their App.

Currently, I work as a Research Assistant at the ASU-Mayo-Clinic Center For Innovative Imaging (AMCII) lab, under the supervision of Professor Teresa Wu, where we developed a framework to apply transfer learning to solve the boiling crisis detection problem in energy generators (Paper published), developed a cross-domain classification framework using unsupervised image-to-image translation models to solve the boiling crisis detection problem in energy generators (Paper under review), developed a framework to generate Pseudo Supervised Metrics to support the unsupervised cross-domain classification framework (Paper in the works), and we work daily on data science & machine learning projects (predictive modeling, data mining, Image Classification, Image2Image translation, Metrics development, ... etc.)


Research Publications

For more information, please check the Research publication section of this website or simply click on the following link: https://www.firashindawi.com/research-publications

Courses & Certifications

         I have a sum of  more than 20 courses and certificates that I have gained through the years. The following is a summary of the most important ones by topic: 

All the certificates for the mentioned courses are available on the following link : https://www.firashindawi.com/courses-certificates 

Computational Skills

Honors & Awards

Interests & Future Plans

I aspire to follow a career path that falls within the following categories:

Firas_CV (1).pdf