MS CS @ Rice University
.Hamza ElMokhtar Shili
I work on efficient and decentralized Mixture-of-Experts, model compression, and federated ML systems.
I am an M.S. student in Computer Science at Rice University , currently working on my thesis in scalable and federated ML systems fo text generation advised by Prof. Anastasios Kyrillidis. I like problems that sit at the boundary between algorithms and infrastructure: how to route, compress, and deploy models so they stay efficient and reliable in the wild.
Previously, I interned with the Vault🔐 Ecosystem team at HashiCorp and then in IBM 👁️🐝Ⓜ️'s Cloud division, building Terraform tooling and distributed CI systems for secure secret management. My efforts earned me the ✨Intern Communication Principle Award✨ at HashiCorp in 2024 and the ✨Intern Execution Principle Award✨ at IBM in 2025.
Long term, I want to help build ML systems that make state-of-the-art models accessible to teams and users far from big research labs.
Research Interests
- Scalable and federated ML systems
- Expert-routed / Mixture-of-Experts architectures
- Optimization-guided model compression and structured pruning
- Applications in NLP, Vision and decision-making systems (like financial markets)
Interests & Hobbies
- 🚴♂️ Biking: recently started riding routes in the shape of countries (Tunisia and South Africa so far).
- 🌍 Traveling: visited 30 U.S. states and 23 countries (and counting).
- 🗣️ Learning languages: speak Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, and currently learning Italian.
News
- 📢 Upcoming - I'll be attending NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego (Dec 2-8). Let's connect if you'll be there! See you in San Diego🌞🌴!
- Oct 2025 - Released our new preprint TwIST: Rigging the Lottery in Transformers with Independent Subnetwork Training.
- Sep 2025 - Our paper Learning to Specialize: Joint Gating-Expert Training for Adaptive MoEs in Decentralized Settings was accepted to NeurIPS 2025 🎉.
- Sep 2025 - Accepted to the MENA ML 2026 Winter School (acceptance rate 13%)🎉 to present my work on federated Mixture-of-Experts for test summarization.
- Aug 2025 - Concluded my software engineering internship in IBM's Cloud division (Vault / HashiCorp acquisition).
- May 2025 - Graduated from Rice University with a B.S. in Computer Science🎉 and started my thesis-based M.S. in Computer Science at Rice.
- May 2025 - Wrapped up my internship with the Vault Ecosystem team at HashiCorp.
Publications & Preprints
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Posters & Presentations
- Hamza ElMokhtar Shili, Sophie Chikhladze, Taeho Choe, Aditi Balaji, Jeffery Huang Rice Data to Knowledge (D2K) Spring 2025 Showcase, Rice University — Houston, TX — May 2025 Poster
- Hamza ElMokhtar Shili, Andres Villada, Shahrazad Ali 11th Eubank Conference on Real World Markets, Rice University — Houston, TX — Apr 2024 Poster
- Jason Han, Jason Ludmir, Hamza ElMokhtar Shili, Tirthak Patel Quantum Computing for Drug Discovery Challenge, ICCAD 2023 — San Francisco, CA — Oct 2023 Report · Code
Teaching & Service
Teaching
- COMP 414/514: Optimization - Algorithms, Complexity & Approximations - Rice University - Head TA
- COMP 412: Compilers Design and Construction - Rice University - TA
- COMP 321: Intro to Computer Systems - Rice University - TA
- COMP 382: Reasoning about Algorithms - Rice University - TA
Mentoring & Service
- Mentor for students from my former high school in South Africa applying to CS programs; helped organize a hackathon to build their coding skills.
- Mentor for undergraduate students interested in scalable and federated ML systems (MoE routing and pruning).
- Volunteer for outreach workshops introducing high-school students in Africa to programming and AI through regional initiatives.