Tzu Chi Foundation
Project Officer
I supported refugee families through the Jordan Bank of Clothes and helped deliver supplies to families who needed them. I also tutored Syrian refugees in computer science and math.
Issam Arida
01
About
Hey! I’m Issam, a Computer Science and AI student at IE University. I’m Jordanian, but I spent most of my life growing up in Dubai, and these days I’m living in Madrid.
What really gets me going is full-stack AI engineering, especially building AI workflows and figuring out how all the pieces talk to each other. I like to move fast, and my favourite problems are the ones that need some serious system design to crack.
I’m looking for work right now, so if you’re building something cool with AI, I’d love to hear about it. Just send me an email!
Hobbies
- I’ve been playing rugby for eleven years at national and international level in the UAE and Jordan, and I’m still out on the pitch here in Spain.
- I also compete in arm wrestling, which is exactly as fun as it sounds.
- I’m very comfortable in front of a camera after doing fashion modeling campaigns. I’d love to act one day, and right now I’m directing my very own horror short film.
- Chemistry has a way of pulling me in, so in my free time I love going down rabbit holes about pharmacy.
Volunteering
COP28 UAE
Coordinator of Volunteers
I built solar lights for a nonprofit initiative, then ran mentoring sessions so other volunteers could learn to assemble them too.
02
Career
Pharmable
I’m building AI that reviews pharmaceutical documents against health regulations before they’re submitted, so teams catch problems long before a regulator does.
First Claude Hackathon in Madrid
A 48-hour hackathon where AI agents faced off in a live trading game and every deal had to be negotiated. We built an agent that negotiated on its own and kept learning from rival teams as the game went on. It even ran its own marketplace where other teams came to trade, and we finished 3rd out of 18.
AI Engineer · Optimiza
I built an AI tool that turns raw meeting transcripts into clear summaries and flags the moments where a client sounds unhappy, which replaced a review process people used to do by hand. Along the way I also configured IIS web services across virtual machines and built a chatbot with Hugging Face Transformers and TensorFlow, served through Flask.
Data Scientist · British Airways
I built an automated system that collected over 13,000 records of competitor fares and seat availability across six routes over two years. Digging into the data uncovered a 29% rise in winter delays and showed demand falling as fares went up on every route, which directly shaped how the airline scheduled its capacity.
EDP × IE Datathon
The challenge was to run battery energy storage systems more efficiently. The batteries charge when solar panels make more power than the grid needs and release it when demand picks up. We predicted supply and demand with multivariate time series forecasting, and our model came first in accuracy.
IE Tech Lab × Bloomberg
I co-developed a Bloomberg-sponsored ESG trust score that helps investors judge how companies do on sustainability, along with a simplified Bloomberg Terminal built for everyday investors. I got to work directly with the Bloomberg team the whole way through.
IE Econ Data Lab × UNDP
A comparative study for the United Nations Development Programme on how cities in North America and South Asia invest in resilience against disasters and other shocks, built on years of economic time series data.
03
Projects
Pharmable
My startup! Pharmable uses AI to check pharmaceutical documents against health regulations before they’re submitted. It points out anything that’s missing and shows exactly which rule applies, so teams can fix problems early and spend far less time on review.
Visit pharmable.devSchrödinger Local Vol
Yes, that Schrödinger. This prices SPX options by solving a Schrödinger equation in imaginary time with a C++ Crank-Nicolson solver. I backtested it on 1.2 million real SPX quotes against SVI, Heston and the practitioner smile, and it came out with zero butterfly arbitrage across 2,019 holdout slices.
View sourceVocable
Point it at any webpage and it reads the whole thing out loud, keeping the speech synced to each sentence so you can follow along. When the writing gets dense, it can translate the page or explain it in simpler words.
View sourceOptimus
The AI voice meeting assistant I worked on during my internship at Optimiza, published here using the public AMI meeting corpus. It labels dialogue acts across 90,142 segments and writes meeting summaries, with ROUGE scores to keep them honest. It also comes with a CLI and tests that run offline.
View sourceStock Watchlist
Private watchlists with live streaming stock quotes, so you can keep an eye on the market. Everyone logs in to see their own lists, and price alerts fire exactly once. The whole thing is backed by 240 tests covering every statement in the measured modules.
View sourceStructural Atlas
A 3D molecule viewer I wrote in C with SDL2. You can flip between wireframe and ball-and-stick views and fly around the structure however you like.
View source
04
Game Dev
Hand-drawn canvas
Every pixel here is drawn on a 2D canvas with my own code. There’s no game engine and no libraries, just a whole lot of tiny rectangles.
Walking around
You can stroll around with the keyboard or the touch pad. Cabins and trees get in your way like they should, and a little prompt pops up whenever you’re close to something.
Cabins you can enter
Every cabin has its own cozy room inside. Walk up to the book on the lectern and it opens that part of my portfolio.
Opening scene
When you hit start, the camera swoops down to my cabin and I walk out the door to say hi.
A living farm
Scroll all the way down and you’ll find a farm running on little loops, from a farmer fetching water to a camper who keeps burning marshmallows.
Accessibility
It respects reduced motion and works with just a keyboard. And if you’d rather not play at all, everything is right here to read.