About me

I pursue a central question: how can foundation models meet practical constraints without compromising capability or trust? I treat efficiency, safety, and multimodal learning as connected system-design problems rather than isolated benchmarks, and I work across the full research cycle — translating a concrete challenge into a precise learning objective, designing and implementing the method, and building the rigorous evaluation pipeline that tests whether it holds up.

That question has taken my work in three directions that reinforce one another: making large language models efficient enough to run under real memory constraints, making them robust against adversarial misuse, and extending learning across language and vision. Each thread has resulted in peer-reviewed publications, most recently a co-first-authored paper in the Findings of ACL 2026.

I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Irvine, where my research on trustworthy and efficient foundation models has accumulated 360+ citations. I have supported graduate courses in machine learning and deep learning at UCI, and I contribute to the research community as a reviewer for peer-reviewed journals.

Areas of Expertise

  • Efficient foundation models icon

    Efficient Foundation Models

    Low-bit quantization that makes large language models practical under tight memory budgets.

  • Multimodal learning icon

    Multimodal Learning

    CLIP and image–text representation learning, including multimodal classification and evaluation pipelines.

  • AI safety icon

    Trustworthy AI & Safety

    Adversarial training and safety classification for LLMs, hardening models against gradient-optimized jailbreaks.

  • Programming languages icon

    Programming & Frameworks

    PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, scikit-learn; Python, SQL, MATLAB, C/C++, Java.

Credentials

Education

  1. University of California, Irvine

    2019 — 2026

    Ph.D. in Computer Science
    Research Focus: Trustworthy and efficient foundation models, including LLM safety, low-bit quantization, and multimodal learning.

  2. University of California, Irvine

    2019 — 2023

    M.Sc. in Computer Science, GPA: 3.98/4.0
    Completed course-based Master's degree during Ph.D.

  3. Sharif University of Technology

    2014 — 2017

    M.Sc. in Computer Engineering, GPA: 3.9/4.0
    Specialization: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
    Thesis: "Analyzing Purchase Satisfaction Using Opinion Mining"

  4. K.N. Toosi University of Technology

    2009 — 2014

    B.Sc. in Computer Engineering - Hardware, GPA: 3.52/4.0
    Thesis: "Text Summarization Using LSA and NMF"

Experience

  1. Research Assistant - Secure Systems and Software Laboratory

    2019 — 2026

    University of California, Irvine (Prof. Ian Harris)
    • Co-designed CoopQ, an end-to-end 2/4-bit mixed-precision quantization framework for LLMs (ACL Findings 2026)
    • Developed Adversarial Prompt Shield (APS) to defend against jailbreaking attacks on LLMs
    • Built CLIP-based multimodal pipelines for image–text classification (SemEval 2022)
    • Created novel machine learning approaches for detecting telephone-based social engineering attacks
    • Led human studies on telephone scams with 186 participants
    • Conducted NSF-funded research on detecting social engineering attacks

  2. Research Assistant

    2017 — 2019

    Sharif University of Technology (Prof. Hamid Beigy)
    • Conducted innovative research on opinion mining techniques to analyze customer purchase satisfaction
    • Leveraged advanced machine learning for large-scale social media analysis
    • Completed thesis on analyzing purchase satisfaction using opinion mining

Publications

Peer Review Service:

  • Reviewer – IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2023

  • Reviewer – Complexity (Wiley/Hindawi), 2022

  • Reviewer – Financial Innovation (Springer Open), 2021

  • Reviewer – International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, 2021

Contact

Contact Form (or just email me!)