Ali is a PhD student in EECS department at MIT. Before joining MIT, he completed his MS studies in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his BS degree in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Iran, where he was awarded the prestigious Iranian National Foundation of Elite Scholarship. Ali’s primary research interest is algorithm design and analysis, in particular, approximation algorithms and combinatorial optimization. His undergraduate internship was at ADSC, the joint research center between UIUC and A*STAR in Singapore. He was involved in a computer vision project, Pill-identification, which has received attention in Singapore and will be commercialized soon. In his spare time, his interests include traditional Persian art, music, and poetry.