About Me

I am Hamidreza Ghasemi Damavandi, currently serving as a Principal Data Scientist in the Actionable Analytics group within the Office of the University Provost at Arizona State University. In this role, I oversee the complete lifecycle of machine learning projects, from model development to deployment. Previously, I worked as a Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Overstock.

I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran (Ranked as the top university overall and the second-best in technology in Iran.) in Summer 2013 and later completed my Master’s and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Iowa in Summer 2016.

For additional details, please see my resume.

FYI - I am a U.S. citizen and do not require visa sponsorship for any role.

Research Interest

I am deeply passionate about Artificial Intelligence, with interests spanning Statistical Machine Learning, Scientific Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and Natural Language Processing. I am also enthusiastic about implementing machine learning solutions on cloud platforms using MLOps principles for efficient deployment and scalability.

Education

B.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, 2013.
M.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, 2016.
Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, 2016.

Talks

[November 2025]: “Cracking XGBoost: The Go-To Machine learning Algorithms for Structured Data”, ASU Data Conference, Tempe, AZ 2024. [Slide]
[November 2024]: “Transformers: Revolutionary Deep Learning Architectures”, ASU Data Conference, Tempe, AZ 2024.
[November 2023]: “An Introduction to Generative AI”, ASU Data Conference, Tempe, AZ 2023. [Video]
[November 2022]: “An Introduction to Deep Learning”, ASU Data Conference, Tempe, AZ 2022. [Slide]
[June 2022]: “Predicting Persistence Using Machine Learning: An Overview of Model Development to Model Deployment”, Air Forum, Phoenix, AZ, 2022.
[March 2022]: “Predicting Student Persistence”, ASU Library Data Science Open Lab, Tempe, AZ, 2022. [Video]

Honors and Awards

Obtained a Green Card in June 2019 through the National Interest Waiver (NIW) for academic achievements. As of September 2024, I am a U.S. citizen.
Ranked 236th among 310,000 in the nation‑wide public university entrance exam for Bachelor of Science, summer 2009.
Ranked 5th for Azad university entrance exam for Bachelor of Science, summer 2009.
Admitted to the University of Tehran, ranked 1st overall and ranked 2nd technology school in Iran, summer 2009.
Served as a convener and chair in a session of Machine Learning applications of Hydrology, AGU 2019.
Full Graduate Research Assistantship scholarship, University of Iowa, 2013.
CGRER graduate travel award, university of Iowa, spring 2016.
Ranked 1st at high school and pre-university program among all students.

Selected Projects

Face Generation: Built a deep convolutional GAN (generative adversarial network) to generate fake images from real celebrity images as part of the Udacity Deep Learning course. [code]
Sentiment Analysis: Implemented text translation and sentiment analysis using Hugging Face transformers. [code]
SLAM: Implemented Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technique as part of the Udacity Computer Vision course to track the location of a robot in a 2D world in real-time and identify the locations of landmarks such as buildings, trees, rocks. [code]
Image Captioning: Trained a CNN-RNN model to predict captions for a given image as part of the Udacity Computer Vision course. [code]
Facial Keypoint Detection: Trained a Convolutional Neural Network using PyTorch to detect facial keypoint (mouth, nose, eyes) in an image as part of the Udacity Computer Vision course. [code]
DNN Speech Recognizer: Built a deep neural network using PyTorch that functions as an element of an end-to-end automatic speech recognition pipeline as part of the Udacity NLP course. [code]
Machine Translation: Implemented an encoder-decoder network using Recurrent Neural Networks for translating English sentence to French sentence and vice versa as part of the Udacity NLP course. [code]
Part of Speech Tagging: Built a hidden markov model for part of speech tagging as part of the Udacity NLP course. [code]
Landmark Classification and Tagging for Social Media: Built a Deep Convolution Neural Network to classify different landmarks found on social media using PyTorch as part of the Udacity Deep Learning course. [code]

Selected Certifications

“AWS AI Practitioner”, earned through the AWS certification exam. [Certification]
“Generative AI with Large Language Models”, earned through the Coursera learning portal. [Certification]
“Natural Language Processing”, earned through the Udacity learning portal. [Certification]
“Computer Vision”, earned through Udacity learning portal. [Certification]
“Deep Learning”, earned through the Udacity learning portal. [Certification]
“AWS Cloud Practitioner”, earned through the AWS certification exam. [Certification]
“AWS Machine Learning Specialty”, earned through the AWS certification exam. [Certification]
“Software Engineer Essentials”, earned through the Coursera learning portal. [Certification]

Contact Information

Address: 1150 E University Dr, Tempe, AZ, 85281
Personal Email: hamidghasemi69@gmail.com

Hamidreza Ghasemi Damavandi