Abdel Ghani Labassi

Bio

I am currently pursuing a PhD in the Applied Mathematics and Statistics Department at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, advised by Mateo Díaz.

I obtained a MSc in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada, advised by Didier Chetelat and Andrea Lodi , affiliated to the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Data-Science for Decision-Making. In addition, I obtained a double major BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics from the same department.

Research Interest

Optimization and machine learning.

Publications/In the pipeline

• Preconditioned subgradient method for composite optimization: overparameterization and fast convergence
  with Mateo Dìaz and Liwei Jiang (*), 2025. PDF
• Learning to Compare Nodes in Branch and Bound with Graph Neural Networks
  with Didier Chetelat and Andrea Lodi, NeurIPS, 2022. PDF

Teaching

I have held teaching assistant (TA) and course developer (CD) positions for, inter alia, the courses listed below.

• AMS662: Optimization for Data Science (CD) - Johns Hopkins University, 2025
• AMS661: Optimization for Finance (TA) - Johns Hopkins University, 2022,2023,2024
• AMS663: Network Models (TA) - Johns Hopkins University, 2022,2023
• IFT2125: Intro to Algorithmics (TA) - Université de Montréal, 2021,2022
• IFT2105 Intro to Theoretical CS (TA) - Université de Montréal, 2019

Projects

• Kaggle Reddit Comment Classification Competition - Team ranked 4th out of 103 teams using a BERT model.
• Unsupervised Tweet Clustering for Mental Health - Collaborated with Health Canada Team to detect signs of depression and suicidal tendencies from tweets.

Random

Check out my Random Photograph Generator. This simple web app displays beautiful photography from Picsum. The page automatically refreshes every 30 seconds to show a new random photograph each time!

Contact

If you would like to get in touch, feel free to reach out via email at alabass1@jhu.edu. Short emails preferred.