Machine learning. Applied work. Public output on GitHub, Hugging Face, and Kaggle.
Security. Vulnerability research. Active on HackerOne.
Also some graphic design on the side, mostly in Photoshop.
I think AI is a national security matter, not a hobby and not just an industry. A country that can't train, audit, or deploy its own models has handed over a meaningful share of its future to whoever can. That's how I read most of what I do. Machine learning and security aren't separate disciplines so much as two halves of the same question: whether a place like Algeria gets to participate in the technologies that increasingly run the world, or just consume them.
I happen to enjoy both. The math is interesting, the systems are interesting, the bugs are interesting; that would be reason enough on its own. But what turns interest into commitment is what sits on top of it. This work has to get done somewhere, by someone, and the people who can do it shouldn't wait for permission. Most countries don't get to opt out of the AI century; they get to choose whether the people doing the work are theirs or someone else's. I'd rather be one of the people who actually did the work, in the place that needed it done.
I want to matter. Not in the influencer sense, which is mostly noise, but in the older sense: I want a career that, ten or twenty years from now, has a short list of specific things that got built, fixed, or understood because I happened to be there to do the work. There's a particular kind of cowardice in choosing problems by how well they translate into a resume line, rather than by how badly they need to be done. The prestigious problems already have queues of capable people. The necessary ones often don't. I'd rather work on something that mattered to a few hundred people in Algeria than something that mildly impressed a few thousand strangers on a feed.
I'm not pretending to be there yet. I'm a student, most of the real work is still ahead of me, and most of what's behind me is groundwork. But I know which direction to walk in, and I am walking. Inshallah, the rest is a question of time.
Being serious about this also means being patient. The work that actually matters tends to be slow, unglamorous, and resistant to being summarised at a dinner party. The people I respect in this field were almost always doing the unrewarding version of their work for years before anyone noticed, and some of them never got noticed at all. That's still a life well spent. I'd rather aim at that than at the kind of career that photographs well and ages poorly.
Email is the reliable channel: ilyes.abbas@ensia.edu.dz.
Elsewhere:
Discord and Instagram, both as il.y.s.
Written by a human, by hand. The content on this site is not licensed for use in ML training or ML-generated content. Algiers, DZ. 2026.