Meet the students: Najla Sadek

From Beirut to Geneva, Najla Sadek has brought her passion for computer science and artificial intelligence to CERN this summer. Currently studying Computer Science and Engineering with a minor in Applied Mathematics at the American University of Beirut, Najla is fascinated by how AI can be used responsibly and meaningfully to serve people.

That curiosity has already led her to projects in machine learning and synthetic data generation, and now, to the CERN openlab summer student programme. “Being selected among thousands of applicants was an incredible honor,” Najla says. “More than anything, it felt like a chance to contribute to something impactful.”

At CERN, she has joined us in the Next Generation Triggers specifically in the IT Department, where she is working on model quantization, a technique that reduces the size of AI models by using lower-precision parameters, while aiming to preserve their accuracy. This optimization makes models run more efficiently, enabling their use in real-time scientific applications. By exploring and evaluating different quantization methods, Najla’s project will provide valuable decision support to researchers, helping them judge when quantization is suitable for inference and training.