Hamza Harkous

Hamza Harkous is a Staff Research Scientist at Google in Zürich, Switzerland. He specializes in applied AI research, focusing on the intersection of natural language processing and data privacy.123

Career Progression

Harkous has had a notable career trajectory:

• Currently a Staff Research Scientist at Google (since November 2023)
• Previously held positions as Senior Research Scientist and Research Scientist at Google
• Worked as an Applied Scientist at Amazon Alexa
• Served as a Machine Learning Scientist at Privately SA
• Completed a postdoctoral research position at EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)

Research Focus

At Google, Harkous leads an initiative to transform the data curation and model building process for large language models, driving advancements in privacy, safety, and security across Google's products.23 His work includes:

• Architecting machine learning models for Google's "Checks" privacy compliance service
• Developing NLP models for Hark, an internal system for feedback analysis at Google

Education

• PhD in Computer Science from EPFL (2017)
• Master's degree in Communication Systems from EPFL
• Bachelor's degree in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Achievements

Harkous has received several notable recognitions:

• Recipient of the 2019 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies
• Winner of the 2017 Thesis Excellence Award from the Information Security Society in Switzerland

Research Projects

Throughout his career, Harkous has been involved in various research projects, including:

• Polisis: A system for visualizing privacy policies using machine learning
• PriBot: A chatbot for automated question answering for privacy policies
• PrivySeal: An automated privacy assistant for installing cloud apps

Harkous's work has been featured in several media outlets, highlighting the impact of his research on privacy and AI.4