Ph.D. Computer Science Student
Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Oregon

Curriculum Vitae

Contact
Email: ttahir at uoregon dot edu

Address
1477 E 13th Ave
Eugene, OR 97403
United States


My research interests broadly cover Optimization, Artificial Intelligence, Game Theory & Security aspects of Multi-Agent Systems. I am particularly interested in the emerging space at the intersection of Machine Learning, Security and Deception.

    Three research directions include:
  • Deception Learning & Planning: Investigating how Machine Learning can be misused to abuse online systems with deceptive strategies.
  • Uncertainty Learning in Attacks: Understanding vulnerabilities of ML systems and improving robustness.
  • Machine Learning for better Security/Privacy: Leveraging advances in ML to build better defenses against attacks on online services.

Update: "Joining AI Research Lab for starting my Ph.D. in Computer Science under Dr. Thanh H. Nguyen at University of Oregon, USA. in Fall 2021".

(2021 - onwards): Ph.D. Computer Science at University of Oregon, USA.

(2014 - 2018): B.S. Computer Science at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST NU), Lahore.
Algo Inc. (2020 - 2021)
Series A: $15 Million
Position: Research Data Scientist
  • Algo is an artificial intelligence company that aims to optimize complex supply chain systems and retail industry using NLP, information retrieval and machine learning.
  • NLP & Data Science Group Worked mainly on 2 research projects:
    • 1. Text to SQL Translation:

      The main objective was to enhance the user experience within Algo chatbot by incorporating natural language to SQL generator using state-of-the-art language models such as NL2SQL-BERT & Seq2SQL and achieved 84% accuracy. Currently, testing it for multiple retailers of Microsoft such as Best Buy.

      2. Context in Group Chat:

      To achieve considerable accuracy on long contextual conversations within group chat, I worked on multiple methodologies in NLP and deep learning including multi-intent dialogs, hierarchical attention, named entity recognition and contextual word embedding.

  • Tools: Python, C++, SQL, NLTK, OpenNMT, Huggingface, Scikit-learn, Spark, TensorFlow, Microsoft Azure.

Afiniti (McKinsey & Company solution) (2019 - 2020)
2017 Valuation: $1.6 Billion
Position: Data Scientist - Artificial Intelligence Research Group
  • Afiniti is a multi-national artificial intelligence unicorn company that aims to intelligently route customers to the best matching representative using big data and AI.
  • AI research department Worked mainly on 2 research projects:
    • 1. Context-aware Anomaly Detection:

      The main objective was to enhance the real time predictions of recommender system by detecting and eliminating the effect of contextual and behavioral anomalies. Novel method was developed using machine learning and big data analytics and achieved 8% overall performance increase.

      2. Clustering:

      To improve the existing clusters for customer-calling groups, domain-aware representations were learnt on the data set of AT&T US and T-Mobile . To achieve the generalization in the approach, few shot learning techniques were used for other similar clients.

  • AI Account Lead:

    Specialized models for increasing profitability of clients: AT&T , Santander Bank , and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts Monthly Invoice: USD 3.5 Million - using Machine Learning simulations and Bayesian statistics.

  • Production Models:

    Debugged and enhanced AI system architecture to provide low-latency real-time predictions of customer interactions.

  • Tools: Python, R, Julia, C++, SQL, Stan, Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, StatsModels.
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST) (2017 - 2019)
Position: Research Assistant - Machine learning and Data Mining Lab
  • Sales Bot Agent & Negotiator:
  • Final year research thesis under Dr. Irfan Younas & Dr. Mubasher Baig - This project aimed to solve the problem of contextual understanding in the chat bot conversation to carry out near-human negotiations. The main intent was to solve the complexity of contextual negotiations on e-commerce and freelancing websites. It was achieved using Bayesian machine learning, NLP and reinforcement learning techniques including Seq2Seq, BERT models.

Computer Vision and Graphics Lab (CVGL) LUMS (2018 - 2019)
Position: Undergraduate Research Assistant
  • Self-driving Cars:
    • Road Scene Classification for Self-driving Cars using Spatio-temporal techniques
    • Incorporating the context of road scenes of both developing and developed countries in a classification model for self-driving cars was the major goal of this research.
    • Collected the Road scenes data comprising markets, bridges, highways, and intersections.
    • Spatial classification using transfer learning approaches (Inception-ResNet-v2 and ResNet-50 models).
    • Handled noise and scene transitions using Spatio-temporal techniques, resulting in accuracies up to 91%.
  • CS401: Artificial Intelligence
    Teaching Assistant of Artificial Intelligence (CS401) Course under Professor Dr. Kashif Zafar (Former Head of Department, Computer Science).
  • Lahore.AI Community
    As a Machine learning Instructor of Artificial Intelligence Community, I conduct hands-on workshops on Machine learning, Data Science Research and Applied AI.
  • Fully Funded Ph.D. Student at University of Oregon with Graduate Employee Award.
  • PKR 50,000 Summer Research Grant from CIVIC NUCES | PKR 1.5 Million Scholarship from NUCES.
  • 1st Position in Innovative Project Competition PRA. Awarded Cash Prize of worth PKR 20,000.
  • Gold Medalist and Distinction in Matric with in Lahore Board | Board Merit-based Scholarship Holder
  • President - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) FAST National University.
  • Brain of Lahore (Mathematics) among top 308 schools 2012 PKR 50,000 Cash Prize