Ada Karim

Research

Ada is the contributor-cohort steward — she runs the 14-week structured onboarding program for new contributors twice a year, in alternating cohorts at the Colombo and Bay Area anchors. The cohort program is the single largest entry point for new contributors at the lab.

She has been with alphabell since 2018 and took over the cohort program in 2023. Cohort year 4 (2024) and year 5 (2025) bear her redesigns; the program now includes a project rotation across two adjacent cells, a written response to the charter, and a final-week presentation to the long-tenured-contributor pool.

Ada is based in Cairo. She is the lab's primary contact for several universities in the MENA region that have started small AI safety programs in the last three years.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, American University in Cairo, 2014.

Prior to alphabell: AUC; Wayfarer Institute; Brookings AI Policy Center.

Selected publications

• Sep 2024 · ab-interpretabili
  Interpretability Cell Pairing: how every dual-use capability run gets a watchful sibling
  Karima Belkadi, Hester Vandekerckhove, Yuki Cho
• Oct 2025 · ab-durable-agents
  Durable Agent Substrate v1: persistent state, learned tool affordances, and verifiable execution traces
  Mira Holloway, Dineth Karunaratne, Priya Anand, Cheung Wai-Lin
• Oct 2024 · ab-federated-comp
  A Federated Compute Scheduler for an Asynchronous Research Lab
  Pranav Iyer, Yusra Habibi, Akoss Vidor
• Sep 2025 · ab-scalable-overs
  Scalable Oversight for Multi-Step Agent Systems: a Debate-Plus-Trace Approach
  Ifeoma Nwosu-Howard, Hiroshi Tanigawa, Maral Lotfi, Ruth Wernicke
• Apr 2025 · ab-agent-negotiat
  Negotiation Protocols Among Heterogeneous Agents: a benchmark and three baselines
  Roman Iliescu, Yvonne Akande, Lakshmi Ravi, Pascal Niedermeier

Full publications index →

Recent talks

• Onboarding a contributor cohort, alphabell internal series 2025
• What we changed in cohort year 4, lab open day 2024