Study Room · Khawaja Abaid Ullah

Curriculum Vitae & Dossier

Khawaja Abaid Ullah — Research & Engineering Record

Ph.D. researcher in Electrical & Computer Engineering at RIT’s Khojasteh Autonomous Systems Laboratory (KAS Lab), U.S. Department of State Fulbright Scholar (4.0 / 4.0 GPA), former AWS AI/ML Software Development Engineer Intern in East Palo Alto, creator of Teras, and official contributor to Keras 3.

01 / Highlights

Fellowship & Industry

Download CV (PDF)

U.S. Department of State · Aug 2024 – May 2026

U.S. Fulbright Scholar — M.S. in AI at RIT (4.0 / 4.0 GPA)

Selected through the flagship international academic exchange program to complete the M.S. in Artificial Intelligence at Rochester Institute of Technology, graduating with a 4.0 GPA and defending my thesis on margin-bounded antidistillation sampling before continuing into a fully funded Ph.D. at KAS Lab.

Master’s Thesis (RIT Repository) ADS-C Preprint (arXiv)

East Palo Alto, CA · May 2025 – Aug 2025 · Full-Time Return Offer

Software Development Engineer Intern, AI/ML — AWS

Engineered core Apache Spark testing and evaluation modules for a next-generation internal benchmarking platform at Amazon Web Services, closing feature-parity gaps with its legacy predecessor and independently delivering additional benchmarking capabilities that earned a full-time return offer.

Open-Source ML Engineering Full Resume / CV (PDF)

02 / Chronology

Full Record & Stack

Appointments, degrees, teaching, academic service, and technical stack.

Appointments & Industry

  1. Graduate Research Assistant (Ph.D. in ECE)

    Full GRA Fellowship

    Khojasteh Autonomous Systems Laboratory (KAS Lab), RIT · Rochester, NY

    • Advised by Dr. Mohammad Javad Khojasteh (expected graduation: May 2029).
    • Researching cooperative multi-agent decision-making, dynamic resource allocation, constrained communication, and compromised-agent containment for disaster search-and-rescue robot teams, alongside test-time antidistillation defenses.

  2. Software Development Engineer Intern, AI/ML

    Full-Time Return Offer

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) · East Palo Alto, CA

    • Engineered core Apache Spark testing and evaluation modules for a next-generation internal benchmarking platform, closing feature-parity gaps with its legacy predecessor.
    • Independently identified and delivered additional benchmarking capabilities beyond original project scope, earning team leadership recognition and a full-time return offer.

  3. Teaching Assistant — Principles of Robotics

    ROS 1 / ROS 2 / Docker

    Rochester Institute of Technology · Rochester, NY

    • Develop lecture and lab material for a combined undergraduate/graduate robotics course; designed reproducible ROS Docker containers and VM images replacing a brittle third-party setup.

  4. Manuscript Reviewer

    IEEE Signal Processing Letters · Academic Service

    • Peer-review manuscripts in machine learning and signal processing for technical soundness, novelty, and experimental reproducibility.

  5. Junior Python Developer (Remote)

    Comundo · Copenhagen, Denmark

    • Built semi-supervised data-curation pipelines for building energy-consumption records used in CO2 estimation and downstream forecasting.

Education

  1. Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Fully Funded GRA · KAS Lab

    Rochester Institute of Technology · Rochester, NY

    Advised by Dr. Mohammad Javad Khojasteh in the Khojasteh Autonomous Systems Laboratory.

  2. M.S. in Artificial Intelligence

    U.S. Fulbright Scholar · 4.0 / 4.0 GPA

    Rochester Institute of Technology · Rochester, NY

    Funded by the U.S. Department of State Fulbright Foreign Student Program. Thesis: “Antidistillation Sampling for Classification.”

    Master’s Thesis (RIT Repository)

  3. B.S. in Computer Science

    Ranked 1st in Class of 2021

    University of Narowal · Narowal, Pakistan

    Graduated first (Valedictorian) in the Computer Science class of 2021.

Technical Stack

Languages
Python · C · C++ · Bash
ML & Deep Learning
JAX · Flax (Linen & NNX) · Keras 3 · PyTorch · TensorFlow · Ray RLlib · PettingZoo · NumPy · Apache Spark
Robotics & Systems
ROS 1 · ROS 2 · Docker · Linux · Git · Arduino
Research Focus
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning · Cooperative Search & Rescue · Antidistillation & ML Security · Knowledge Distillation · LLM Evaluation & Optimization

Available for research collaboration in cooperative autonomy, ML security, and open-source ML systems.

khawaja.abaid@gmail.com CV (PDF) GitHub LinkedIn