Research with purpose.

Dr. Muhammad Asif Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Science at Information Technology University (ITU), Lahore, and Director of FORTE Lab, the Foundation Models, Reasoning, Trustworthy and Explainable AI Lab.

He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), Australia, in 2021. Before joining ITU, he worked as a Researcher at the Shenzhen Institute of Computing Sciences, a Postdoctoral Researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), and an AI Solutions Consultant with the ALT Research Group at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI).

His research focuses on large language models, particularly LLM reasoning, reinforcement learning and preference optimization, knowledge reasoning and editing, multilingual and multimodal AI, interpretability, and trustworthy and culturally aware AI. His earlier work explored graph convolutional methods for denoising naturally occurring data. At KAUST, he also worked on Arabic foundation models and their applications.

His academic and research career includes projects supported by OpenAI, KAUST, Saudi Aramco, the United States Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and Pakistan's National ICT R&D Fund, as well as projects recommended by the Research, Development and Innovation Authority of Saudi Arabia.