Dr. Ahmed Hassan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Research on Evaluation, Science, and Technology (CREST).  Dr. Hassan has a Ph.D. in computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence. He has an M.Sc and B.Sc. (Honours) in Mathematics. He received the Sudanese Minister of Higher Education Prize in Mathematics. He recieved the third prize of the Center of High-Performance Computing poster competition for PhD students in science and engineering in South Africa.

Dr. Hassan was a postdoctoral researcher for the Research Chair on Machine Learning which is a partnership between the University of Pretoria and Multichoice (here). Dr. Hassan worked on the automated design of video quality assessment metrics and produced metrics that outperformed the state-of-the-art metric (VMAF) developed by Netflix (here is the paper). His work in video quality metrics was highlighted as one of the flagship projects of the Research Chair for the past 6 years (here).

Dr. Hassan worked on hyper-heuristics and improved the performance of the best-known hyper-heuristic for the CHeSC International Research Challenge hosted by the University of Nottingham and attracked considerable attention. He developed Dynamic Heuristic Sets (DHS) to improve the best-known hyper-heuristic for the challenge (here is the paper). DHS is available in github and the Javadoc can be found here