Hi i'm Essam 👋
San Francisco, CA
Founder, researcher, and engineer interested in self-improving AI agents.
I'm CEO & Founder of Canvas AI building coding agents for knowledge work, backed by YC. Previously, I led the design and training of Twitch's first video foundation model from scratch, where I also developed a novel continual learning method.
At Harvard, I contributed to one of the first video LLMs: MiniGPT4-Video (ECCV) and led research on adversarial robustness published at CVPR. Before that, I co-founded Komma (sales automation) and started CodeLab, a student builder club (now 150+ members).
I'm based in SF and love to play basketball, grab coffee, and hike. Feel free to reach out, you can find me on Twitter.
Experience
Canvas AI (YC F24)Founder
Building Canvas AI backed by YC. GTM, Engineered.
HarvardResearch
worked on LLMs and Vision Models. Over 250+ citations in top conferences like CVPR and ECCV. Check out my Google Scholar for more.
TwitchApplied Science
Trained Twitch's first video foundation model. Developed a continual learning framework for unsupervised, online model training.
AWSResearch Eng
Built ml platform for AWS IVS customers to deploy their ml models. Service in production
KommaCo-Founder/CTO
covid hit and all meetings went online. scheduling a time to meet for clubs and group projects was a pain so we built komma to automate it. realized sales reps had a similar problem so we sold to them.
CodeLabFounding President
noticed there wasn't a strong builder community here, so founded and led CodeLab, which has become the largest builder club at uc davis with now over 150 members. we build software for both students and tech companies like Snapchat and Reddit.
College
HarvardMS CSE
published research on video LLMs including MiniGPT4-Video and Goldfish (ECCV 2024), and adversarial attacks on vision transformers with SlowFormer (CVPR 2024).
UC DavisBS CS
Finished classes in 2.5 years. Took a year off to work at Twitch and build Komma.