Basel Shbita

Dr. Basel Shbita is a Research Scientist at IBM Research in Almaden, San Jose. He focuses on enterprise data and governance for AI models as part of the watsonx and Granite projects.

In 2024, Basel earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science, advised by Prof. Craig Knoblock, at the Center on Knowledge Graphs within the University of Southern California (USC) Information Sciences Institute (ISI). Basel's research focuses on techniques for describing, acquiring, and exploiting data semantics and combining these techniques to build knowledge graphs as a means to solve complex information integration problems. He has participated in several projects at USC-ISI, including Linked Maps, Critical-MAAS, Model Integration (MINT), Table Understanding ,and the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4.

Basel has over 10 years of experience in software engineering, programming, and debugging across various languages, having assumed several tech lead roles. Before pursuing his PhD at USC, he worked for Mellanox Technologies (acquired by Nvidia) from 2011 to 2017 as a Senior Firmware Engineer and Team Leader in the Switch Silicon Core Department, and for Apple in 2018 as an Embedded Software Engineer in the Flash Storage Software Department. Basel received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University in 2015.