Shafik Quoraishee is a Senior Games ML Engineer at The New York Times, where he’s a key member of the team behind flagship titles like Wordle, Connections, Crosswords, and Strands sessionize.comstevensducks.com+9shafikquoraishee.com+9x.com+9. With a strong foundation in computer vision and AI, he has developed tools, demos, and real-world systems that bridge cutting‑edge research and practical applications sessionize.com+2shafikquoraishee.com+2nyc.droidcon.com+2.An experienced Android developer with over 11 years in the field, Shafik led the MakerWeek 2023 initiative to build an experimental handwriting recognition feature within the NYT Crossword Android app. His work involved end‑to‑end design: from “SketchBox” input handling, preprocessing diverse handwriting styles, to training a convolutional neural network and integrating it using TensorFlow Lite nyc.droidcon.com+1sessionize.com+1.As a thought leader in AI and games, he regularly speaks at industry events, including GDC’s AI Summit 2024, Eng X engineering summits, and Droidcon NYC 2025. His talks cover topics such as handwriting recognition, generative AI in games, GANs, and the interplay of AI and game theory . He is also an active researcher and writer, publishing on Medium and Nieman Lab about topics like neural nets, auto‑encoders, facial recognition, and experimental game‑AI tools.
Data & AI