He also leads the project Plato at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of David Forsyth. His research has been mainly focused on computer vision and machine learning. More specifically, he is interested in semantic scene understanding, visual knowledge extraction, object recognition, transfer learning, and attribute based representations of objects. Ali has been awarded the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, the inaugural Google fellowship in computer vision and image interpretation, the university of Illinois CS/AI 2009 award, C.W. Gear 2010 Outstanding Research Award, and CVPR2011 and AAAI 2016 Best Student Paper Award.