Hassan

Hassan Barmandah

AI Researcher & Software Engineer

I work on Arabic NLP, multimodal evaluation, and large language models - from dialectal generation and OCR to hallucination detection and human-preference benchmarking.

Publications

Mourad Mars, Hassan Barmandah, Abdulrhman Alassaf

Haakkim: An Arena-Style Human Preference Evaluation Platform for Arabic LLMs

IEEE Access · Under Review · Jul 2026 · [Website] [Hugging Face]

Arena-style human evaluation platform for LLMs across 11 Arabic dialects - 1,100+ pairwise comparisons over 67 models, ranked via Bradley–Terry (ESS = 582).

Hassan Barmandah, Fatimah Emad Eldin, Khloud Al Jallad, Omer Nacar

Ketaba-OCR at AR-MS NakbaNLP 2026: Efficient Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Hand Written Recognition

Proceedings of LREC 2026 · NakbaNLP 2026 Shared Task · May 2026 · [Model]

CER = 0.0819, WER = 0.2588 on blind per-line evaluation - ranked 1st in that setting.

Hassan Barmandah, Fatimah Emad Eldin, Omer Nacar

Fine-Tashkeel at KSAA-2026: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Seq2Seq and Multimodal Approaches for Automatic Diacritization of Arabic Speech Dictation

Proceedings of LREC 2026 · KSAA-2026 Shared Task, OSACT7 Workshop · May 2026 · [GitHub]

DER = 10.56%, WER = 34.47%, SER = 79.88% - 5th of 7 teams in the KSAA-2026 shared task.

Hassan Barmandah

Saudi-Dialect-ALLaM: LoRA Fine-Tuning for Dialectal Arabic Generation

arXiv · Aug 2025 · [arXiv] [GitHub]

Presented at 1st Research Conference for Students of Makkah Region Universities (RCUSM), Jeddah.

Hassan Barmandah, Omar Abdullah Bawazir, Siraj Aldeen Marghalani, Moath Shaat, Abdullah N. Alkattan, Mariam M. AlEissa

Beyond Mean Absolute Error: Ancestry-Stratified Calibration and Explainability for Warfarin Dosing Models

MDPI Journal of Personalized Medicine, 16(10), 531 · Oct 2026 · [DOI]

Ancestry-stratified calibration and explainability analysis for machine learning-based warfarin dosing models.

Hassan Barmandah, Israa Elhosiny, Yousra Alaa El-Ghawi, Omer Nacar (NAMAA Community)

NAMAA Community at AraGenre 2026: From Encoder Baselines to Self-Consistent LLM Ensembling for Hierarchical Arabic Genre Classification

Proceedings of the 4th Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026) · [GitHub]

Zero-shot LLM classification with self-consistency sampling reached 0.7013 hierarchical macro F1, ranking 3rd of 18 teams.

Mona A. Azim, Hassan Barmandah, Yousra Elghawi, Omer Nacar (NAMAA Community)

NAMAA Community at DialectSentEval 2026 Subtask 1: Dialect-Aware Arabic Sentiment Classification with Pretrained Transformer Models

Proceedings of the 4th Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026)

Dialect-aware sentiment classification across Moroccan, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi Arabic - MARBERTv2 achieved the strongest result at 94.07% macro F1.

Najd Albahly, Hassan Barmandah, Karim Elsayed, Hewida Ali, Yousef Abdullah, Omer Nacar (NAMAA Community)

NAMAA Community at HalluScoring 2026: Beyond Predictive Performance: Reliability and Generalization in Arabic Hallucination Detection

Proceedings of the 4th Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026) · [GitHub]

CAMeLBERT cross-encoder hallucination detector achieved 0.7596 ROC-AUC, ranking 3rd of 7 teams; temperature scaling and MC-Dropout deferral further improved calibration and reliability.

Abdelbasset Djamai, Hassan Barmandah, Nour Qandos, Samar Ahmed, Omer Nacar (NAMAA Community)

NAMAA Community at StanceEval-2026: From Encoder and Decoder Model Fine-Tuning to Data-Centric Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Arabic Stance Detection

Proceedings of the 4th Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026)

Retrieval-augmented in-context learning ensemble for Arabic stance detection achieved Favg2 of 0.8719 (Track 1, ranked 3rd) and 0.9016 (Track 2, ranked 7th).

Hassan Barmandah, Yousra Elghawi, Mona A. Azim, Omer Nacar (NAMAA Community)

NAMAA at DialectSentEval 2026 Subtask 2: From Reranked Sampling to Cross-Backbone Ensembling for Arabic Dialectal Sentiment Swap

Proceedings of the 4th Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026)

Cross-backbone ensembling for Arabic dialectal sentiment-polarity swap reached 96.78 development accuracy; best official test score was 0.7597.

Zahra Alharz, Hassan Barmandah, Abdulrhman Mahyoub, Saad Saeed Alahmari

Sarab: A Cause-Diagnostic Arabic Visual Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models

In Preparation

Cause-diagnostic Arabic visual hallucination benchmark for multimodal LLMs, evaluated across four models.

Hassan Barmandah

Sawb: Cultural Hallucination Detection in Arabic LLMs

arXiv Preprint · ICAIRE 2026 Hackathon Track 3 · [Hugging Face] [GitHub]

4-model Arabic encoder ensemble (AraBERT, AraBERT-Large, ARBERTv2, MARBERTv2) for detecting cultural hallucinations - 0.9647 macro F1 on 457 validation examples, with Arabic explanations generated for all 163 detected hallucinations.

Hassan Barmandah, Siraj Aldeen Mohammed Marghalani, Omar Abdullah Bawazir, Muath Shaat, Abdullah N. Alkattan, Mariam M. AlEissa

WarfaRisk: A Reproducible, Fairness-Aware Machine Learning Pipeline for Warfarin Dose Prediction (Prototype)

MDPI AI · Under Review

Reproducible, fairness-aware pipeline for warfarin dose prediction - leakage-free preprocessing, ablation across 9 model architectures, leave-one-ancestry-out evaluation, conformal prediction calibration, SHAP explainability, and a FHIR R4 clinical decision-support interface.

Experience

Research

Research Engineer

Aug 2026 – Present

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (On-site)

Board Member, Research Team Lead

Jan 2026 – Present

NAMAA Community · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Remote)

Research Fellow

Jul 2026 – Sep 2026

King Khalid University · Abha, Saudi Arabia (Remote)

Undergraduate Research Fellow

Jun 2026 – Sep 2026

Alfaisal's AI Center · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (On-site)

Research Assistant

Oct 2025 – May 2026

Umm Al-Qura University · Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Hybrid)

Industry

AI Engineer

Jun 2026 – Present

MawHub · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Remote)

Deputy Director of Technical & Development Department

Oct 2025 – Present

Synapse · Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

AI Engineer Intern

Nov 2025 – Jun 2026

Lucidya · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Remote)

Quality of Work Initiative Article

Data Analyst Intern

Jul 2025 – Aug 2025

Uptrail · London, UK (Remote)

Recommendation Letter

AI & Robotics Engineer Intern

Jun 2025 – Aug 2025

Smart Methods · Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (On-site)

Volunteering

Member of Technical Staff

Jun 2026 – Present

Specialized Med AI Lab (SMAIL) · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Remote)

AI Engineer

Jun 2026 – Present

Global Students Research Conference (GSR) · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Remote)

Vice President of the R&D Club

Apr 2026 – Present

Umm Al-Qura University

RDC UQU

Ambassador

Aug 2026 – Present

Global Students Research Conference (GSR)

Vice President of the Scientific Committee, R&D Club

Oct 2025 – Jan 2026

Umm Al-Qura University

RDC UQU

Platform Engineer

Jun 2025 · 1 mo

AL-YAMAMA Company

Platform Engineer

May 2026 · 1 mo

AL-YAMAMA Company

Volunteer

Oct 2024 · 1 mo

Ministry of Sport

Receptionist / English Translator (Hajj Season 1445)

Jun 2024 – Jul 2024

Ashour Hotel

Receptionist (Hajj Season 1444)

Jun 2023 · 1 mo

Ashour Hotel

Projects

Products

Asalah

Live Product · Built at Alfaisal's AI Center

Haakkim

Live Product · Built at Umm Al-Qura University

RDC UQU

Live Product

LucidFlow

Live Product · Built at Lucidya

Synapse

Live Product · Built at Synapse

SMAIL

Live Product · Specialized Med AI Lab (SMAIL)

Notebooks & Projects

Sawb - Arabic Cultural Hallucination Detection

Hugging Face · May 2026

Python · Arabic NLP · Hallucination Detection · Ensemble

Saudi-Dialect-ALLaM

Paper (arXiv) · Aug 2025 · First-author, RCUSM Jeddah

PyTorch · LoRA · ALLaM-7B · Arabic NLP

Ketaba-OCR at AR-MS NakbaNLP 2026

Model · Colab · Apache 2.0

Python · QLoRA · DoRA · HTR

Fine-Tashkeel at KSAA-2026

NAMAA Community · 2026

Python · Transformers · ByT5 · Arabic NLP

QARI-OCR-LoRA

Model on Hugging Face · Apache 2.0

Python · LoRA · DoRA · RSLoRA

MLP-from-Scratch

MIT License

Python · Neural Networks · Backpropagation

Professional CV Generator

Python · Flask · LaTeX · Docker

Smart-Methods-Tasks

MIT License · Jun–Aug 2025

G-code · Arduino · OpenCV · ROS2

Chat App

MIT License

Python · XML-RPC · customtkinter · Multithreading

ArASL - Acc > 97%

Kaggle Notebook

Computer Vision · Sign Language · Arabic · Deep Learning

Fruit Recognition (EfficientNet, Acc > 99.91%)

Kaggle Notebook

EfficientNet · Transfer Learning · Image Classification

K-Means Clustering

Kaggle Notebook

Clustering · Unsupervised Learning · Python

cDCGAN - CelebA Female or Male

Kaggle Notebook

GAN · cDCGAN · CelebA · PyTorch

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic (StanfordCars)

Kaggle Notebook

DDPM · Diffusion · Stanford Cars · PyTorch

Sentiment Classifier Model

Kaggle Notebook

NLP · Sentiment Analysis · Classification

Vanilla GAN (MNIST)

Kaggle Notebook

GAN · MNIST · Generative Models · PyTorch

Replications

Re-implementations of influential AI/ML papers from scratch - focused on understanding experimental design, methodological rigor, and the gap between paper and practice. Work in progress.

Education

B.S. in Software Engineering

Expected June 2027

Umm Al-Qura University · Makkah, Saudi Arabia

GPA: 3.87 / 4.00

Honors & Awards

Merit, 2nd International Competition on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIREA 2026)

Jul 2026

Associated with Umm Al-Qura University

First Place, Tourism Innovation Hackathon (Smart Tourism & Advanced Technologies Track)

Jun 2026

Associated with Umm Al-Qura University

First Place Winner, AI Glossary Challenge (ICAIRE)

May 2026

Award, Smart Methods

Aug 2025

Associated with الأساليب الذكية Smart Methods