PhD · AI Researcher

Building AI people can trust.

I'm Yasser Khalafaoui, an AI researcher. I make AI models reliable enough to put in front of real people, and I teach the next generation how to ship them.

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About

I lead AI research at Kompanion, where we build digital therapeutics for brain health. My current research focuses on LLM safety and hallucination mitigation, building on a PhD in multimodal and unsupervised learning applied to recommender systems.

In parallel, I’m driven by a passion for using multimodal AI to support investment decisions: combining market data, text and other signals to act in real time, with proper risk management at the core.

I also teach and write. Cracking AI is my technical blog about AI: each post builds the intuition, explains the ideas properly, and comes with a hands-on implementation you can run yourself.

Portrait of Yasser Khalafaoui

Yasser Khalafaoui, PhD

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What I work on

[now · Kompanion]

A conversational companion for brain health

I build Kompanion's conversational agent end to end, from multi-agent orchestration and MCP servers to product evaluation datasets and dashboards checked against ground truth, for us and our partners.

[research]

LLM safety & hallucinations

Detecting and reducing hallucinations, hardening models against adversarial prompts, and measuring both with evaluations that reflect real use rather than leaderboards.

[AI advisor · MentorAI]

A mentor, not a chatbot

Designing a guarded conversational agent that gives users a genuine mentoring experience, with content recommendations tailored to their profile and grounded in psychology frameworks such as RIASEC.

[on the side]

AI & finance

Using multimodal AI to support investment decisions, with risk management built in and decisions made in real time.

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Latest writing

all posts →
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The path so far

The short version, without skill bars or star ratings. If you’d like my full CV as a PDF, get in touch and I’ll send it over.

  1. industry 2020 – now

    From prototypes to production

    AI researcher at Kompanion, shipping LLM features for digital therapeutics. Before that, R&D at Alteca on speech, emotion recognition and recommender systems, and research coordination for the open-source Sound of AI project.

    KompanionAltecaSound of AI
  2. thesis 2021 – 2024

    Multimodal & unsupervised learning

    PhD at CY Cergy Paris University (CIFRE with Alteca and the ETIS lab): Advancements in Multimodal and Unsupervised Learning with Application to Recommender Systems. Multi-view clustering, matrix factorization and multimodal recommendation.

    PhDrecommender systemsmulti-view clustering read the thesis →
  3. teaching now

    Teaching at aivancity

    I teach MLOps, Data Wrangling and The Future of AI to third-year undergraduate and fifth-year graduate students. Earlier, data visualization and systems programming at CY Cergy Paris University.

    MLOpsData WranglingFuture of AI
  4. education 2016 – 2021

    From engineering to research

    An engineering degree in computer science at INSEA (Morocco), then a master's degree in data science and analysis at Sorbonne Paris Nord University, which led me into research on multimodal and unsupervised learning.

    INSEASorbonne Paris Nord
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Selected publications

  1. PR
    Deep Matrix Factorization with Adaptive Weights for Multi-View Clustering
    Yasser Khalafaoui, Basarab Matei, Martino Lovisetto, and 1 more author
    Pattern Recognition, 2026
  2. arXiv
    CADMR: Cross-Attention and Disentangled Learning for Multimodal Recommender Systems
    Yasser Khalafaoui, Martino Lovisetto, Basarab Matei, and 1 more author
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.02295, Dec 2024
  3. SSCI
    Multi-modal Multi-view Clustering based on Non-negative Matrix Factorization
    Yasser Khalafaoui, Nistor Grozavu, Basarab Matei, and 1 more author
    IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, Dec 2022
  4. DKE
    French translation of a dialogue dataset and text-based emotion detection
    Pierre-Yves Genest, Laurent-Walter Goix, Yasser Khalafaoui, and 2 more authors
    Data and knowledge Engineering, Nov 2022