Sami Abu-El-Haija started programming since he was 11 years old, and started earning income from startups and various organizations at the age of 15. He obtained his Electrical and Computer Engineering B.Sc from the University of Toronto with honors. He then worked as a Big Data and a Machine Learning engineer for a series of silicon valley startups that got acquired. He started his graduate degree at Stanford, doing research in Computer Vision with Professor Fei-Fei Li, then moved to the University of Michigan Ann Arbor to continue the research project with professor Li as she was on her sabbatical. He graduated with a Masters degree from Michigan, moving onto Google Research where he currently holds a position with the Machine Perception group. His current research directions include Computer Vision and Graphs. In particular, developing and training Deep Neural Networks that can understand videos, as well as learning compact representations of large biological or social-graphs.