About Me

I am now a Lead Researcher at Technology Innovation Institute (TII). Before that, I obtained my Ph.D. at University of Paris-Saclay in 2022, where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Karine Zeitouni and Dr. Yehia Taher. I received my B.Sc degree in Optical & Electronic Information from Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China in 2015, and my M.Sc. degree in Data Science from University of Paris-Saclay, France in 2018, as well as an engineer degree in Computer Science from Polytech Sorbonne & Sorbonne Université, France in 2017. My current research interests are mainly in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly: Large-scale pre-training; Emerging architectural designs beyond or in combination with Transformers.

Current Open Positions (2025)
We’re recruiting LLM research interns (and a small number of full-time roles), see job descriptions here. If you’re interested, please feel free to reach out.

• (2025.5) 🔥 We’re thrilled to announce the release of Falcon-H1 Series! Featuring a novel hybrid Transformer–SSM architecture, Falcon-H1 sets a new state of the art (SoTA) across every scale—0.5B, 1.5B, 3B, 7B, and 34B, and outperforms leading Transformer models double its size. Dive into the details in our latest blogpost 🔍
• (2025.5) 🚀 We just released Falcon Edge! A series of powerful, universal, fine-tunable 1.58bit language models, check the blogpost here.
• (2024.12) Falcon 3 is out! Five base models + their Instruct versions: 1B, 3B, 7B, 10B and a more advanced 7B Mamba model, check the blogpost here.
• (2024.10) The technical report for Falcon Mamba 7B is released - check it here.
• (2024.08) Falcon Mamba 7B is released - the first strong attention-free 7B language model. Try it out in HuggingFace, check the blogpost here.

Preprint:

• J. Zuo, M. Velikanov, D. Eddine Rhaiem, I. Chahed, Y. Belkada, G. Kunsch and H. Hacid: “Falcon Mamba: The First Competitive Attention-free 7B Language Model”, arXiv’24

Organizing committees:

• MDM 2020 Web Chair of the 21st IEEE Mobile Data Management Conference
• JDSE 2019 Junior organization committee of the 4th Paris-Saclay Junior Conference on Data Science and Engineering

Program committees:

• ECAI 2024 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• CIKM 2023, 2024 ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
• ECML-PKDD 2020 The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases

Reviewing:

• TKDE IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
• TheWebConf 2024 The ACM Web Conference 2024
• Inf. Sci. Information Sciences
• Artif. Intell. Rev. Artificial Intelligence Review
• JBHI IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
• SIGSPATIAL 2022 ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
• ICDE 2021 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
• AAAI 2021 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• SSTD 2021 International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases
• DSAA 2020 IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics

• firstname dot lastname at tii dot ae
• PO Box: 9639, Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE