Experience

Founder (Sept 2024 – Sept 2025)
AutoAware AI

Conceived the company, built a functional MVP prototype, and secured non-dilutive funding.
Developed quantisation-aware vision models that recognise 17 driver-safety behaviour classes from an 800,000-image dataset (e.g., phone use, drowsiness, distraction-related actions).
Delivered real-time inference on low-cost edge-AI boards—balancing speed, accuracy, and hardware cost—via INT8 quantisation and input-resolution optimisation, with negligible latency and very low false-alarm rates.
Implemented an on-device driver-assistance prototype that provides real-time alerts; pilot testing across multiple vehicles demonstrated high detection precision. [Video1] [Video2] [Video3]

Adjunct Faculty (Jan 2024 – Jan 2025)
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran

Designed and delivered the graduate course “Applied Machine Learning” to MS/PhD cohorts.
Lectured on classical-to-modern ML: linear/non-linear regression, SVM, decision trees, random forests, KNN, CNN architectures, YOLO, GANs.
Taught Python ML stack from first principles (NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn, OpenCV, PyTorch, TensorFlow).
Supervised capstone projects that applied ML/DL to transportation and infrastructure, including:

Autonomous-vehicle decision centre (deep-learning planner)
Smart-card analytics for bus ridership patterns
Vision-based pavement-defect and structural-failure detection
Vulnerable-pedestrian object-detector benchmarking
Multi-severity road-pavement distress grading

Postdoctoral Researcher (Jan 2022 – Nov 2023)
Electrical Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Co-founded the Sharif Center for Information Systems & Data Science (advisor : Prof. Babak Khalaj); drafted a multi-year ML/AI research roadmap and forged international collaborations.
Led a team of graduate and undergraduate students delivering projects in computer vision, metaverse and blockchain, edge AI and intelligent transportation.

Graduate Research Assistant (Dec 2016 – June 2019)
Institute for Transportation (InTrans), Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

Developed various ML and DL models in fields like intelligent transportation systems and self-driving cars.
Co-developed an autonomous golf-cart prototype: integrated LiDAR, radar and camera hardware; implemented lane-line extraction, multi-sensor fusion and real-time control demos.
Collaborated with 12+ PhD/MSc researchers across data-science projects; mentored junior students on ML workflows.
Assisted the PI and managers in creating research proposals, writing grant proposals, and preparing technical reports.

Researcher (2014 - 2015)
Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT), Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA

Worked on detecting recurring and non-recurring traffic congestion using big data analytics.
Constructed various statistical models for analyzing traffic conditions.