Dr. Alaa Maalouf is the Neubauer Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Haifa, where he is the director of the GOATS Lab (Generalizable & Optimized AI for Technology and Science). He is also a Research Affiliate at MIT CSAIL, an Associate at Harvard SEAS, and a Principal Investigator in Project CETI. 

Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL, working with CSAIL Director Prof. Daniela Rus. Before that, he completed his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Dan Feldman at the University of Haifa. 

In addition to academia, Dr. Maalouf spent five years in industry, serving as a Lead ML Researcher at Data Heroes Ltd. and as a chip-design engineer at Mellanox Technologies (now part of NVIDIA). During his PhD and postdoctoral work, he also collaborated extensively with industry on real-world problems, including projects with Samsung Research (leading to the outstanding paper award honorable mention at NeurIPS), the Toyota Research Institute, and several startups.

His recognitions include the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE) MAOF award for excellent young faculty, a Neubauer Family Foundation Fellowship (grant), a NeurIPS Spotlight, a NeurIPS Best Paper Honorable Mention, an Outstanding Reviewer award at CVPR, and more. He is also a TEDx speaker. 

His research focuses on efficient and generalizable AI, physical AI (world models for robots), and AI for scientific discovery.