Speakers
Shafik Quoraishee, Senior Game Developer, The New York Times
Shafik Quoraishee is a Senior Games Machine Learning Engineer at The New York Times, where he works on flagship games including Wordle, Connections, Crosswords, and Strands. With a background in computer vision and applied AI, he builds tools and production systems that translate research ideas into real, shipped features. He has over 11 years of experience as an Android developer and led MakerWeek 2023 at The New York Times, where he spearheaded the development of an experimental handwriting recognition system for the NYT Crossword Android app. That work spanned the full pipeline, including custom handwriting input (SketchBox), preprocessing varied writing styles, training a convolutional neural network, and deploying it with TensorFlow Lite. Shafik is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as GDC's AI Summit, Eng X engineering summits, and Droidcon NYC, where he presents on topics including handwriting recognition, generative AI in games, GANs, and the relationship between AI and game theory. He also writes about machine learning and experimental game AI, with published work on platforms such as Medium and Nieman Lab.