Nour Zahra

Research

Nour is a co-lead on erdos-77 with Tariq al-Mansoori. Her contributions centre on the empirical side of cross-cell review compounding — how often a paired interpretability cell catches something the producing cell missed, how often the producing cell pushes back successfully, and how the disagreement-resolution machinery actually performs in practice.

She has been with alphabell since 2021 and is based in Beirut. She is one of the contributors who works most carefully on the question of how the cross-axis methodology review pool should be staffed in periods of high RSI-run activity.

Nour is the lab's primary contact for several MENA-region academic groups.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, American University of Beirut, 2016.

Prior to alphabell: AUB; 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
• 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
• May 2025 · ab-mechanistic-ci
  Mechanistic Circuit Analysis at Frontier Scale: cells as a unit of interpretability
  Jiang Yifei, Nico Almgren, Karima Belkadi, Hester Vandekerckhove
• Mar 2025 · ab-verifiable-pol
  Toward Formal Verification of Learned Policies in Bounded Environments
  Aviva Stern, Sun Kyung-min, Felipe Avelar
• Nov 2024 · ab-sandboxed-self
  Sandboxed Self-Modification: a confinement specification and implementation
  Liora Sabatini, Cheung Wai-Lin, Marek Holub

Full publications index →

Recent talks

• What makes review actually compound, alphabell internal series 2025