People Biography

Biography

Usman Zafar is a Research Associate with the Energy Management Group at Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI) in Doha, Qatar. He is a certified Google Cloud Architect and also a certified Cloudera & GCP certified Data Engineer with broad experience in Machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Speech (Speaker Diarization) as demonstrated by his coursework experience and multiple publications in leading journals/conferences.  He is also well versed in modern neural architectures and adept in techniques that make use of pre-trained models such as transfer learning that are essential for companies with small datasets. While he has worked a lot in machine learning, he believes it would have been impossible to train huge datasets without the required data engineering skills, which he attained through practical work on Hadoop, Spark and Google Cloud, and by completing relevant Google Cloud and Cloudera certifications. Mr. Zafar has worked on technologies such as BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc, Spark etc. and has the skillset to handle data of any size. As an organized, detail-oriented person with strong communication skills, he believes one of his primary strengths is his ability to learn new technologies quickly and effectively. At QEERI, he works on designing software systems for IOT use-cases, machine learning for energy disaggregation and forecasting energy demand and optimization of locations for maximum demand where demand can be defined by the end-user. Prior to working at QEERI, he has worked at many other places including Schneider Electric and Texas A&M University.