Hi, I’m Akbar.

Computer Engineer / AI and Systems Engineer

I build across AI systems, software infrastructure, and hardware.

My work spans governed agents, production platforms, applied machine learning, embedded systems, and digital design, with a focus on reliability, performance, and systems that hold up in practice.

Enterprise AI · AHEAD

across abstraction layers

projects & research

01 / governed ai

SAGE – Secure Agentic Governed Execution

Research-driven architecture for governable AI-executed work and reusable AI artifacts.

Independently authoring a system that identifies and enforces common governance invariants across agentic workflows, keeping persistent context, authorization, and human oversight explicit.

scope: AI-executed work and reusable AI artifacts
context: Persistent state across governed workflows
authorization: Explicit permission and execution boundaries
oversight: Human-in-the-loop controls

Python · FastAPI · PostgreSQL · Harness Engineering

Independent research · architecture in development

github repo

02 / ml research

Machine Learning, Chess & Mathematics Research

Faculty-supervised research applying machine learning and mathematical analysis to chess.

evaluation: Engine-guided analysis with Stockfish
decisions: Algorithmic decision-making
modeling: Iterative training of a custom model
analysis: Machine learning and mathematical methods

Python · Machine Learning · Stockfish

UIC MSCS MURL · MATH 496

03 / fpga acceleration

PocketFilter – FPGA Accelerator for Real-Time DNA Target Detection

A battery-friendly, GPU-free accelerator for real-time nanopore DNA target detection.

Developing the accelerator on the AMD/Xilinx AUP-ZU3 through a faculty-sponsored Senior Design project, using Dynamic Time Warping and hardware/software co-design for portable, field-deployable sequencing.

algorithm: Dynamic Time Warping for target detection
validation: Python-backed golden-model verification
hardware: AMD/Xilinx AUP-ZU3 FPGA platform
evaluation: Throughput and power benchmarking

FPGA · Vitis HLS · PYNQ · Python · DTW

Faculty-sponsored Senior Design project

See all work →

experience

Enterprise AI Intern

May 2026 – Present · Chicago, IL (Hybrid)

AHEAD

Year-round role on AHEAD's Enterprise GPT team, with technical ownership of an AI skills and agent governance initiative spanning Glean and Claude, including a validated self-service model for creating, reviewing, and reusing skills across licensed users.

Authored the foundational architecture narrative for a proprietary agentic platform, cleared by the CTO as the internal source of truth for enablement and stakeholder approval.

AI Trainer, Model Evaluation & Safety

Apr 2026 – Present · Multiple Engagements

Professional Services · Sep 2026 – Present, via AKA Services
Invited to a specialized domain-expert engagement developing expert-level software-development and information-systems tasks for frontier-model training and evaluation.

AI Safety / Red Teaming · Apr 2026 – Aug 2026
Red-teamed frontier LLMs through adversarial prompting and structured evaluations, uncovering and characterizing failure modes across reasoning, coding, and instruction following.

AI-EDGE REU Fellow

Jun 2026 – Jul 2026 · Mentor-paired REU

NSF AI-EDGE Institute, The Ohio State University

Advanced study across LLMs, generative models, AI security, and distributed AI, with applied work in Vision Transformers, agent security, and multi-agent systems.

AI Systems Engineer

Oct 2025 – Mar 2026 · Remote

Talent Strategy Experts

Architected and shipped the MVP of a multi-tenant SaaS platform for AI inference, owning the full stack, deployment, isolation boundaries, and role-based access control.

Deep Learning / AI Research Intern

Jun 2024 – Aug 2024 · Chicago, IL

UIC Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Led five interns building a PyTorch image-classification pipeline that reached 30% higher accuracy than baselines, and completed hardware/software co-design training with hls4ml.

B.S. Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Chicago · May 2027
Minor in Mathematics · specializations in Computer and Networked Systems, Data Science and Engineering, and Digital Systems and VLSI (tracks)

See full history →