Education
PhD in Artificial Intelligence, University of Surrey
October 2022 - Present | EPSRC funded | Final thesis write-up stage
Thesis: Architecture and Objective Design for Robust Recommendation under Sparse Implicit Feedback. Supervisors: Prof Simon Hadfield, Dr Matthew Vowels, and Prof Liqun Chen.
MEng (Hons) Electronic Engineering with Nanotechnology, University of Surrey
September 2019 - June 2022 | First Class
Final project: Novel Design of Capacitive Tactile Sensor and Velostat Evaluation.
Electronic Engineering with Nanotechnology, University of York
September 2018 - June 2019 | Year 1, First Class (93%)
Research interests
- Recommender systems and sparse implicit feedback
- Multimodal and sequential learning
- Contrastive and graph representation learning
- Fair representation learning
- Optimisation, loss design, and distributional robustness
- Privacy-preserving machine learning
Research experience
PhD Researcher in Artificial Intelligence, University of Surrey
October 2022 - Present
- Conducting EPSRC-funded research on architecture and objective design in recommender systems, spanning multimodal and sequential recommendation, fair representation learning, optimisation, loss functions, and robust evaluation.
- Leading the end-to-end research workflow from literature review and problem formulation through implementation, experiments, ablations, analysis, visualisation, and writing.
- Reviewing research for SIGIR, AAAI, ICML, ICLR, and RecSys from 2024 to 2026.
Professional experience
IT and Sales Associate, Gulf Conferences Ltd
June 2019 - Present
- Coordinate website, social media, video, and graphics activity while supporting network infrastructure, troubleshooting, data access, and backups.
- Organise virtual events and support client-facing sales and university relationships.
Selected projects
Technical skills
Programming: Python, C/C++, MATLAB
Machine learning: PyTorch, recommender systems, multimodal learning,
sequential modelling, contrastive learning, fair representation learning, optimisation,
model evaluation, and experimental design
Research: LaTeX, technical writing, literature review, visualisation, and
research communication
Selected publications and manuscripts
- Differential Adjusted Parity for Learning Fair Representations. ICLR AFAA Workshop, 2026. arXiv / PDF
- DSL: Understanding and Improving Softmax Recommender Systems with Competition-Aware Scaling. arXiv:2602.07206, 2026. arXiv / PDF
- Multimodal Enhancement of Sequential Recommendation. arXiv:2602.07207, 2026. arXiv / PDF
- Sequences as Nodes for Contrastive Multimodal Graph Recommendation. arXiv:2602.07208, 2026. arXiv / PDF
Awards and funding
EPSRC-funded doctoral research, University of Surrey.
Languages
English and Arabic.
Contact
London, UK
Email: bsahiony@gmail.com