Hajar Doukhou

AI Research Engineer · AI Safety

I started by proving theorems,Now I build systems that learn.

And spend as much time thinking about what they optimize for.

Hajar Doukhou

About

Some systems compute. Others learn. The difference interests me, especially the part we can't fully explain yet.

I work on reinforcement learning because it's the framework where the machine learns through consequence, not from a fixed picture of the world. Right now that means studying what happens when you accelerate policy optimization and whether those mechanisms survive contact with language models.

My method runs as a loop: start with the question, ask why it is hard, then decide which tool to reach for, then ask whether it holds — and back to the question again. Understanding why something is hard usually reveals which tools are worth reaching for, and which ones will only disguise the problem.

Things I reach for: ablations, the counterexample, the null result, baselines. Things that disguise a weak result: a bigger model, a lucky run, a metric only ↑, clean stories.

Sketched in the margin: plot what we measure and what we wanted against optimization pressure and the two leave the origin together, tracking closely. Then they part. What we measure keeps climbing; what we wanted peaks partway across and bends back down. The gap that opens between them after that peak is the thing worth caring about.

Rigour without impact is just decoration. I want the work to matter.

Work

Selected problems I have chased end to end.

How long have you got?

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Showing featured projects. More work lives below the fold if you have brought coffee.

Recognition

First Place

Morocco High-Speed Train Challenge - Rail Industry Summit Casablanca

2024

A vision for railway maintenance that speaks the language of data, combining physics-informed modeling, optimization and LLMs to move from reactive interventions to dynamic planning.

Second Place

AI for Sustainable Cities and Communities Challenge - GITEX Africa - AI for SDGs

2025

Connected cities, protected communities: a federated flood-risk system that connected sensors, geospatial intelligence and local data to strengthen urban resilience and help African territories learn together.

Third Place

Fintech Hackathon - ENSIAS Fintech Club

2024

FortunAI: a step toward more human-centered finance, combining behavioral insights, spending intelligence and real-time guidance to make financial decision-making more accessible and proactive.

Leadership

IEEE ENSIAS Student Branch

@ieee.ensias

President

Aug 2024 – Aug 2025

Sponsorship Manager

Nov 2023 – Jul 2024

Understanding each person's objective function is the prerequisite to building anything together.

Still thinking about what these systems optimize for.

hajar.doukhou@outlook.com

Hajar Doukhou · 2026