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Staff Software Engineer & AI Researcher at Google Research
About Me
About Me
I am a computer scientist specializing in highly scalable graph algorithms, machine learning, and data curation for machine learning models. Currently, I am a Staff Software Engineer at Google AI within the Graph Mining team (reporting to Vahab Mirrokni). I have been a part of the Gemini team since its inception.
My primary focus is developing data curation pipelines and test-time scaling for Google's Gemini models. I lead the Contextual Sampling team and our efforts, particularly in training Gemini models for Trust and Safety, have been recognized with the Google Research Tech Impact Award in both 2023 and 2024.
My academic background is rooted in computational hydrodynamics. During my PhD at the University of Southern California (advised by Patrick Lynett and Cyrus Shahabi), I developed Celeris, an open-source, GPU-accelerated wave simulation software. By democratizing high-performance computing in coastal engineering, Celeris is now used by thousands of researchers across more than 50 countries.
Seeking AI guidance? Please reach out to me on LinkedIn.
EMPLOYMENT
Google AI
Google AI
Senior Software Engineer, 2018 - Present
2021-Now: I am leading the Contextual Sampling team of Google, developing and applying scalable graph-based techniques on applications ranging from Gemini to Search AI Overview and YouTube.
2018-2020: I was a tech lead in github.com/kartta-labs, an open-source project for unrendering historical maps and reconstructing 4D map of the world. We used artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing to tackle tasks such as 3D reconstruction, georectification, vectorization, etc. Have a look at it here: http://re.city.
Celeria Labs, LLC
Celeria Labs, LLC
Founder, 2020 - Present
Celeria Labs specializes in computational hydrodynamics. Its major product is Celeris, a simulation software for nearshore waves. Learn more at celerialabs.com.
Niantic, Inc.
Niantic, Inc.
Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2018
I was the very first Intern of Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go. I contributed to the launch of Ingress Prime as part of the core Unity3D engineering team.
Google
Google
Software Engineering Intern, Winter 2018
As a member of the core engineering team of Code Jam, I significantly contributed to the launch of Code Jam 2018 competition on the new platform and received a shiny spot bonus for the “heroic launch”.
Google
Google
Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2017
As a member of the Brand Lift team, I scaled up the ad quality measurement tools both in time and space, from spontaneous runs in specific regions to continuous monitoring in several countries.
EDUCATION
University of Southern California
University of Southern California
Master of Science in Computer Science 2016
Thesis: Efficient Geospatial Crowdsourcing for Post-Disaster Decision Making [CONF. PAPER]
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Master of Science in Computational Hydraulics 2013
Thesis: Curvilinear Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics [JOURNAL PAPER]
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Bachelors of Science in Civil Engineering 2010
Thesis: Shear Force Distribution in Open Channels [JOURNAL PAPER]
Gemini Team, et al. (2025). "Gemini 2.5: Pushing the frontier with advanced reasoning, multimodality, long context, and next generation agentic capabilities." arXiv preprint.
Gemini Team, et al. (2023). "Gemini: a family of highly capable multimodal models." arXiv preprint.
Stretcu, O., Vendrow, E., Hata, K., Viswanathan, K., Ferrari, V., & Tavakkol, S. (2023). "Agile modeling: From concept to classifier in minutes." Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision.
Tavakkol, S., Son, S., & Lynett, P. (2021). Adaptive third order Adams-Bashforth time integration for extended Boussinesq equations. Computer Physics Communications, 265, 108006.
Tavakkol, S., Han, F., Mayer, B., Phillips, M., Shahabi, C., Chiang, Y. Y., & Kiveris, R. (2021). Kartta labs: Collaborative time travel. In 54th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2021 (pp. 5337-5346). IEEE Computer Society.
Tavakkol, S., Shahabi, C., Han, F., & Kiveris, R. (2020). "Piaget: A Probabilistic Inference Approach for Geolocating Historical Buildings." IEEE International Conference on Big Data.
Tavakkol, S., & Lynett, P. (2020). "Celeris Base: An interactive and immersive Boussinesq-type nearshore wave simulation software." Computer Physics Communications.
Tavakkol, S., & Lynett, P. (2017). "Celeris: A GPU-accelerated open source software with a Boussinesq-type wave solver for real-time interactive simulation and visualization." Computer Physics Communications.
(See Google Scholar for the complete list of publications and patents)
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