Hi there, I’m Michael.

I am a (fourth-year) Computer Science PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI), and a reserach assistant at FAIR (Meta AI). Both are part of an excellence joint program between HUJI and Meta AI, under the guidance of Prof. Roy Schwartz and Dr. Yossi Adi.

My primary focus is on large language models (LLMs), where I’m particularly interested in making them more efficient and accessible. A significant part of my research involves investigating neural mechanisms for LLMs. I also enjoy exploring LLMs for reasoning, code generation, and mathematics, as well as speech language models (SLMs). For further details, please see my publications.

Before this, I spent almost four years at Google (Search Console and Google research) as a software engineer and a researcher (part-time and full-time internships). My academic background includes a B.Sc. (summa cum laude, “Amirim” excellence program) and an M.Sc. (magna cum laude, excellence program) in Computer Science from HUJI. More details are available in my CV (updates are infrequent).

Other than that, I consider my marriage to Miri Varshavsky (now also) Hassid to be my greatest personal achievement. I also occasionally participate in spoken word performances.