CV Download CV (PDF)

Summary

  • Ph.D. researcher in LLM interpretability with a foundation in high-dimensional geometry and statistical algorithms, building datasets and activation steering pipelines to control LLM behaviors such as verbosity, sentiment, and formality. Ph.D. expected May 2028.

Skills

Languages Python, C++, JavaScript, Dart
ML & LLMs PyTorch (CUDA), Hugging Face (Transformers, Datasets, Hub), TensorFlow, scikit-learn, Activation Steering, TransformerLens, data curation, LLM evaluation & benchmarking (LLM-as-judge), Cloud GPUs
Systems & Tools Flutter, BLE, Docker, Podman, Node.js, MongoDB, REST APIs, CI/CD, Git, pybind11, CMake

Research Experience & Publications

  • 2026

    LLM Benchmark Auditing — Surface-Feature Leakage (TruthfulQA-476)

    University of Utah
    • Showed that the binary-choice TruthfulQA benchmark is separable by answer style alone: a question-blind six-feature model (SURFACE6) hits 68.9% accuracy (AUC 0.715) — above the best model on the llm-stats TruthfulQA leaderboard (66.9%); auditing 13 additional benchmarks finds similar leakage, most severe on HaluEval QA (AUC 0.973).
    • Designed Audit-Prune, a classifier-cleaner algorithm, and released TruthfulQA-476, a cleaned split that cuts audit AUC to near-chance (0.528) while preserving model rankings (Spearman ρ = 0.915) (code).
    • Paper: Judging by the Cover: Cleaning LLM Truthfulness Benchmarks to Avoid Surface-Level Feature Leakage — arXiv 2026, under review at NeurIPS 2026 (arXiv:2609.13003).
  • 2025–Present

    LLM Activation Steering and Robustness under Dataset Corruption

    University of Utah
    • Prototyped verbosity/tone steering in Llama 3.1 and Qwen-2.5 via residual-stream injections (layer/α sweeps; unpublished).
    • Built a guardrailed LLM-judge evaluation pipeline with JSON-schema-validated outputs, rejecting malformed judge responses.
    • Made steering resilient to noisy and adversarial dataset corruption (Llama 3.2, Mistral 7B, OLMo 2; six behaviors) via robust high-dimensional mean estimation, in collaboration with Martian AI.
    • Released three public contrast datasets on Hugging Face (conciseness–verbosity, positivity–negativity, formal–informal) for steering and evaluation.
    • Paper: Understanding and Mitigating Dataset Corruption in LLM Steering — 2026 (arXiv:2603.03206).
  • 2025

    Efficient Multi-Dimensional Two-Sample Testing (dKS)

    University of Utah
    • Extended the Kolmogorov–Smirnov distance to multiple dimensions: a unit-invariant metric (IPM) with a near-linear O(n log n) ε-approximate algorithm.
    • Shipped as an open-source C++/pybind11 library — ~76,000× faster than exact O(n²) computation at ~1M points in 2D (code, project page).
    • Paper: Efficient and Stable Multi-Dimensional Kolmogorov–Smirnov Distance — submitted to Foundations of Data Science; authors listed alphabetically (arXiv:2504.11299).
  • 2023–Present

    MotionPI — Privacy-First Wearable Health Sensing Platform

    University of Utah
    • Sole developer of the mobile app, backend, and offline-first sync layer (smartphone app → API → database) within a multi-institution study team; wristband firmware by Ohio State collaborators — capturing longitudinal, in-the-wild participant data end to end.
    • Streamed wristband ENMO, accelerometry and survey signals to the phone with offline-first, schema-validated sync, with raw high-rate PPG/IMU archived on-device; sustained ~7.7M records/day with zero malformed writes.
    • Built an ENMO threshold-calibration visualizer for rapid activity-trigger tuning and data-quality review (code); filed and diagnosed an upstream Flutter SDK packaging bug, triaged P2 by the Flutter team (issue).
    • Built the participant-monitoring report the study team uses for weekly compliance follow-ups; typical per-participant wristband records rose from ~400–600 to 700–800, with some participants reaching 1,000 (study-team reported), recovering data that would otherwise be silently missing.
    • Paper: Designing a Secure and Resilient Distributed Smartphone Participant Data Collection System — EAI SmartSP 2025, Springer LNICST vol. 699, pp. 283–293 (doi, arXiv:2510.19938).
  • 2023

    Anomaly Detection — Region-Aggregated Spatial Scan Statistics

    University of Utah
    • Replaced SaTScan-style centroids with 20–50 points sampled per region: higher detection power, scanning 3,711 region polygons spanning all 3,108 continental U.S. counties in 0.33 s (~3,000× faster than FlexScan, scan step only) (code).
    • Paper: Sampling for Region-Aggregated Spatial Scan Statistics — ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026, accepted as a full paper (58/248, 23.4%) (arXiv:2607.01451).
  • 2022

    Computer Vision — High-Dimensional Spectral–Spatial Change Detection

    University of Tehran
    • Created a dual-stream 3D/2D CNN with SE attention; accuracy >96%, κ > 0.9, and lower false positives vs. baselines.
    • Paper: A Hyperspectral Change Detection (HCD-Net) Framework Based on Double Stream Convolutional Neural Networks and an Attention Module — Remote Sensing 16(5):827, 2024 (DOI).

Education

  • 2023–2028

    Ph.D. in Computer Science

    University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
    • Advisor: Prof. Jeff Phillips.
    • Expected graduation: May 2028.
    • GPA: 3.9/4.0
    • Focus: LLM interpretability; high-dimensional geometric data analysis.
    • Relevant coursework
      • Machine Learning
      • Probabilistic Machine Learning
      • Deep Learning
      • Data Mining
      • Visualization
  • 2019–2022

    M.Sc. in Computer Science (Algorithms & Computation)

    University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
    • GPA: 17.74/20
    • Thesis: Graph-theoretic modeling of bushfire propagation.
    • Relevant coursework
      • Advanced Algorithms
      • Approximation Algorithms
      • Randomized Algorithms
      • Quantum Algorithms & Computation
      • Graph Algorithms
      • Network Science
      • Internet Algorithms
      • Distributed Systems

Honors and Awards

  • 2023

    Graduate Fellowship

    University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
  • 2020–2022

    Top-Talent Scholarship (merit)

    University of Tehran
  • 2019

    M.Sc. University Entrance Exam — Rank 29/20,000 (top 0.15%)

    National M.Sc. Entrance Exam, Iran

Presentations

  • 2025

    Talk — Designing a Secure and Resilient Distributed Smartphone Participant Data Collection System

    EAI SmartSP 2025
  • 2025

    Poster — Efficient and Stable Multi-Dimensional Kolmogorov–Smirnov Distance (dKS)

    Utah AI Summit 2025

Languages

Spoken English, Hawrami, Kurdi, Persian