Yousef Turk
builderGrade 12 at Liwa International School Al Mushrif, Abu Dhabi. Building like the deadline is tomorrow.
I'm a high-agency builder with a founder's operating system. I don't wait for permission, a team or a syllabus. I find the hardest problem in the room, ship something that works, and put it in front of people who can break it. Research, AI agents, robots. Tokenmaxxing through hackathons is how I learn.
The scoreboard so far: a first-author paper ranked Top 40 globally at the Global Research Challenge 2026, 1st place against university teams at the ADU Engineering Hackathon, Best Design at Cognition and Hub71's Fish Tank for Qalaa, an agent-permissions system I pitched to judges from OpenAI and Palantir at 16.
Latest: 1st place at the Qoder AI Hackathon by Alibaba Cloud at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, the region's flagship AI event. In 48 hours my team built UnderGrid, a 3D digital twin of the city's underground infrastructure where AI agents spot, predict and fix pipe failures before the street breaks.
Jensen Huang put it plainly: you won't lose your job to AI, you'll lose it to someone who uses AI. I'm not planning to be either. I'm building the AI everyone else will be using.
This year I'm also launching my school's first AI Fair at Liwa International School Al Mushrif.
What I'm looking for next: design + AI projects. Creative tools, interfaces that can judge their own layout, anything where taste meets the model. If you're building one, email me.
Wins
Results, biggest first. No participation trophies.
Top 40
2026, globally
2026 (results)
1stAI Hackathon at , , for UnderGrid. 8,000 Qoder credits
Oct 2026 (UnderGrid)
1st
Engineering Hackathon, AED 5,000
May 2026
Best DesignFish Tank by & , for . $400 in Devin credits
Sep 2026 (Qalaa)
6th
× Abu Dhabi AI PropTech Challenge
Jun 2026
4th
The Last Dance, × at
Jul 2026
Research
Questions I chased until the numbers answered.
2026
2026
First author · Top 40 globally · Credential GRC26-G5XH86
My paper, “Steering Cellular Attractor Trajectories via Continuous-Time Vectorized RL,” asks how to order multi-step gene edits so each one lands safely on a cell the previous edit already changed. I built an AI model of cell trajectories and a GPU simulator that runs 4,000+ paths in seconds on public Perturb-seq data, so the edit orders worth real lab time can be picked out first.
(Top 40)
2026
Robotics Summer Program
Research week · with Prof. Farah Shamout and Costanza Armanini
I researched a soft, snake-shaped search-and-rescue robot designed to reach into collapsed spaces a rigid robot can't. I built the heartbeat and signal model it would use to locate people, and learned MuJoCo and Isaac Sim during the week. This was research, not a finished robot.
(NYUAD)
Sep 2026
How Much Does the Page MoveIndependent study · answering Requests for Research
Taste Labs asked for coordinates for websites, the way physics has coordinates for objects. I took the smallest version of that I could measure: 3,056 page elements across 65 window widths, to test whether responsive layout shifts can be learned. A boosting model predicted where elements land with a 7.3px median error, beating a one-line CSS rule (26.7px) and a linear model (44.1px).
(read it)
Hackathons
Shipped against the clock. Pitched to the people building the frontier.
Oct 2026
AI Hackathon
1st place · Champion Award · × Qoder, with ·
One of 100 builders at ADNEC Centre for a 48-hour build, and we took first place and the Champion Award. My team built UnderGrid, a 3D digital twin of downtown Abu Dhabi's underground pipes and cables. AI agents watch weak sensor signals, predict which pipe will fail and when, weigh who's affected, and hand crews a repair plan before the street breaks.
(repo)
May 2026
Engineering Hackathon
Technical lead · 1st place · AED 5,000
I took a high-school team into a university bracket and won it. We built Bondly, a family AI platform with five voice modules that runs encrypted on-device, so no audio ever reaches a server.
Sep 2026
Fish Tank by &
Built · Best Design award · $400 in Devin credits · Hub71 × hackathon
With two teammates I built Qalaa, a permission layer that grants and revokes what AI agents can do inside government and enterprise systems. We pitched it to judges from , , Cognition, and , as one of the youngest teams in the room at 16, and took the Best Design award.
(repo)
Sep 2026
NEXUS Incubator Builder Workshop
Built Outlaw · ×
I built Outlaw, an agentic system for protecting critical infrastructure: AI agents pen-test servers, patch what they find and resolve issues while keeping systems protected. Outlaw became the foundation for .
Jun 2026
× Abu Dhabi AI PropTech Challenge
Global hackathon · 6th place
I built Xpand, which finds service gaps across 39 UAE districts, forecasts 12 months of demand and drafts investor-ready RFPs with .
Jun 2026
× Gemma 4 Hackathon
24-hour global AI hackathon
I built Cue in 24 hours: four Gemma 4 31B agents running on Cerebras inference that watch live data and flag commerce incidents as they happen.
Jul 2026
The Last Dance
4th place · × at
Placed 4th in a four-hour build and presented the result to Socia's engineers and founder.
Design
Where taste meets the machine.
I love design, and I don't think of it as the paint on top of the engineering. It's where judgment lives.
Taste is a measurement we haven't built yet.
In a lab the world grades you. Mass doesn't care how confident you are, and you can't sweet-talk a physics engine. Design is the last field where you can still lie with a screenshot. I want to build the referee: models that can tell you a layout is broken, the way my reflow study measured how a page actually moves instead of arguing about it.
AI should take the labour, not the voice.
A model can generate a thousand directions in a minute. Deciding which one is true to what you're trying to say is still a human act, and it's the part worth protecting. The tools I want to make do the exhausting work and leave the authorship with the person, so everyone's work doesn't start to look the same.
The interface is the argument.
People don't read an idea first, they feel it. Spacing, motion, the sound a button makes: that's where trust is won or lost before anyone reads a word. I treat craft as part of the claim, not decoration around it.
That's the work I want to do: projects where creativity, design and AI meet, from creative tools to interfaces that can explain and judge themselves. This site is my sketchbook. Every interaction on it was chosen, tuned and art-directed by me.
Leadership
Nobody handed me a team. I built the room.
2026–27
AI Fair
Lead organizer ·
I started my school's first AI Fair, where middle and high school students will build and present projects in agentic AI, robotics, machine learning and reinforcement learning.
2026–27
Robotics Team
Vice President ·
I lead robot design for the Grade 12 team, keeping mechanical and programming work in sync so the sensor systems stay aligned. I write the autonomous navigation code and mentor 15+ younger students every week in coding and mechanical design.
2025–now
Synthica
Associate researcher & editor · CS/AI research team
I review CS and AI papers from students worldwide, checking the code, the writing, and whether each claim is backed by the experiments.
2026
Future-Proofing in the Age of AI
Lead keynote speaker · workshop lead
I gave the lead keynote to 100+ Grade 10 and 11 students on starting their own projects, getting into research labs, and building a career in AI.
Education
My school, and every room I could get into.
Now
High school senior · Grade 12 · Class of 2027
My school in Abu Dhabi, where I'm Vice President of the robotics team and lead organizer of the first AI Fair. Grade 11 Term 2 average: 92.8%.
(school)
Jul 2026
University Prep Program
UPP · two days at NYU Abu Dhabi
Workshops on choosing the right fit, the Common App and personal essays.
(UPP)
2026–27
2026
Hybrid Intelligence Bootcamp
Five-day bootcamp
I built and pitched a mini startup to MBZUAI professors and the IEC president.
(MBZUAI)
Dec 2025
NextGen Bootcamp
Co-founder, Vertigrow
I co-founded Vertigrow, a vertical-farming venture, and pitched it to judges from , , and .
2026
2026
2026
AI Professional Certificate
Completed Google's seven-course AI certificate.
Learning
The stack I ship with, sharpened every week.
Languages and tools I write in: Python, PyTorch, scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, Hugging Face, vLLM, LoRA, LangChain, LangGraph, Gymnasium, MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Git.
The stack I write in
Python first: models, agents, reinforcement learning and simulation.
- ML
- PythonPyTorchscikit-learnLightGBMXGBoostCatBoostHugging FacevLLMLoRA fine-tuning
- Agents & RL
- LangChainLangGraphReinforcement learningGymnasium
- Robotics
- MuJoCoIsaac SimGit
- People
- Public speakingTechnical presentationsPeer mentoringPaper reviewUI/UX design
Writeups
What I built, what broke, and what the numbers said.
Sep 2026
When you squeeze a webpage, do the boxes move in a pattern?
I wanted to know if a webpage has any physics. When you make the window narrower, do the boxes move in a pattern a model can learn, or is every page a mess? I measured 3,056 boxes on 25 pages. A one-line CSS rule beat a simple linear model. A tree model beat the rule. Median error went from 26.7 pixels to 7.3.
Sep 2026
Aug 2026
June 2026
May 2026
May 2026
Campus
One ask, for my school.
I want to be the campus ambassador for AI tools at Liwa. Our robotics team already ships with Claude Code and Codex. Back us, and you're backing students who build real hardware, not slide decks.
We don't have a 3D printer yet, and it's the single biggest bottleneck on our builds. If you run a program that could help, or can send one, email me. I'll show you exactly what it turns into.
(E-Mail)
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