Ali attended the University of Texas at Austin for both his Bachelor and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. During his graduate work, he focused on robotics and AI systems. Ali's major contribution during his Master's work was creating a fully robotic system that was able to navigate autonomously multiple floors in a building to deliver coffee to individuals. Within IBM, Ali works at the Watson Innovation Labs and leads the robotics team there. His goal is to find innovative uses for Watson services in the space of robotics.