Ralph Abboud

Current Work. I am a Principal Scientist at Renaissance Philanthropy (RenPhil), leading the organization’s AI for Math program and several internal AI projects and initiatives. I also support RenPhil’s AI for Education programs.

Previous Roles. Before joining RenPhil, I worked at the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute (now also housed at RenPhil), initially at Schmidt Futures, then at the Digital Harbor Foundation. Previously, I completed a D.Phil in Computer Science from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Dr. İsmail İlkan Ceylan and Prof. Thomas Lukasiewicz, with my research focusing on graph representation learning (GRL).

Contact. For professional inquiries (e.g., consulting, collaboration, research) and for personal queries, please reach me at ralph {at} ralphabb.ai.

News

I have been promoted to a Principal Scientist at Renaissance Philanthropy (RenPhil). (May 2026)
I joined Renaissance Philanthropy (RenPhil) as a Program Scientist. (July 2025)
Outstanding reviewer at ICML 2025 (July 2025)

Selected Publications

PlanE: Representational Learning over Planar Graphs, NeurIPS 2023.

Radoslav Dimitrov , Zeyang Zhao , Ralph Abboud , İsmail İlkan Ceylan

code paper

Shortest Path Networks for Graph Property Prediction, LoG 2022.

Ralph Abboud , Radoslav Dimitrov , İsmail İlkan Ceylan

code paper

Approximate Weighted Model Integration on DNF Structures, AIJ 2022.

Ralph Abboud , İsmail İlkan Ceylan , Radoslav Dimitrov

paper

The Surprising Power of Graph Neural Networks with Random Node Initialization, IJCAI 2021.

Ralph Abboud , İsmail İlkan Ceylan , Martin Grohe , Thomas Lukasiewicz

code paper

BoxE: A Box Embedding Model for Knowledge Base Completion, NeurIPS 2020.

Ralph Abboud , İsmail İlkan Ceylan , Thomas Lukasiewicz , Tommaso Salvatori

code paper

For a complete list of my publications, please check my DBLP and Google Scholar profiles.

Education

D.Phil in Computer Science

2018 - 2022

University of Oxford

Thesis Title: Learning and Inference over Relational Data

M.Sc. in Computer Science

2017 - 2018

University of Oxford

B.E. in Computer Engineering

2013 - 2017

Lebanese American University (LAU) , Minor: Mathematics