Joining BRAC University as a Lecturer.
AI Research Engineer
Asif Azad
AI Innovation Team · Ministry of Defence, Saudi Arabia
Open to Fall 2027 PhD opportunities
I am an AI Research Engineer at the AI Innovation Hub, Ministry of Defence Health Services , Saudi Arabia, where, under the research supervision of Professor Ehsan Hoque , I develop AI-enabled healthcare systems spanning autism screening, clinical assessment, and intervention in collaboration with major medical cities and hospitals across the country. This work includes a research partnership with the MIT Media Lab . More broadly, my work explores responsible and trustworthy AI for high-stakes domains, especially healthcare, through multimodal reasoning and agentic systems. I also collaborated with Dr. Md Rizwan Parvez at QCRI on the reliability of state-of-the-art vision-language models; our work was published at Findings of EACL 2026 .
I earned my BSc in Computer Science & Engineering from BUET in March 2025. My undergraduate thesis on reliable diagnostic machine learning was supervised by Professor M Saifur Rahman , with mentorship from Md Saiful Islam , a Machine Learning Software Engineer at Google . The resulting paper, Beyond Accuracy , was nominated for the AIiH 2025 Best Paper Award. I was also named to the Dean's List for three consecutive years and received the IEEE Richard E. Merwin Student Scholarship as its sole Fall 2023 recipient from Bangladesh.
Updates
Selected news
Harf-Speech accepted at Interspeech 2026.
Published our work on conformal uncertainty quantification for VLMs at Findings of EACL 2026.
Joined BUET’s Department of CSE as an Adjunct Lecturer.
Reviewed manuscripts for the October cycle of ACL Rolling Review (ARR).
My undergraduate thesis paper, Beyond Accuracy , was nominated for the AIiH 2025 Best Paper Award.
Presented “AI in Medicine: Transforming Healthcare Today & Tomorrow” at the 52nd Annual National Conference of the Ophthalmological Society of Bangladesh .
Joined the Ministry of Defence AI Innovation Hub as an AI Research Engineer.
Captained my BUET hall basketball team to the championship and finished as the top scorer.
Research
Selected publications
Harf-Speech: A Clinically Aligned Framework for Arabic Phoneme-Level Speech Assessment
A clinically validated, phoneme-level Arabic speech assessment framework that aligns automated pronunciation scores with expert speech-language pathologist ratings.
Digital Harf: A Clinically Integrated Multimodal AI System for Pervasive Arabic Speech and Language Therapy
A culturally grounded, multimodal AI platform that extends clinician-led Arabic speech and language therapy into the home for children with autism.
Validation of Remote Multimodal AI Screening for Parkinson Disease Across Diverse Settings
A cross-setting validation of PARK, a remote multimodal screening tool evaluated on 1,865 participants across supervised clinical and unsupervised home environments.
PULSAR: Graph-Based Positive Unlabeled Learning with Multi-Stream Adaptive Convolutions for Parkinson’s Disease Recognition
A graph-based positive-unlabeled learning framework for Parkinson’s recognition from webcam-recorded finger-tapping videos.
The Art of Saying ‘Maybe’: A Conformal Lens for Uncertainty Benchmarking in VLMs
A systematic conformal uncertainty study of 18 open- and closed-source vision-language models across six multimodal datasets and three scoring functions.
Beyond Accuracy: Enhancing Parkinson’s Diagnosis with Uncertainty Quantification of Machine Learning Models
An evaluation of Monte Carlo Dropout, Deep Evidential Classification, and Bayesian Neural Networks for reliable Parkinson’s diagnosis across motor, facial, and speech datasets.
Background
Experience
Apr 2025 — Present Saudi Arabia
AI Research Engineer
AI Innovation Hub, Ministry of Defence Health Services
Developing AI-enabled healthcare systems spanning autism screening, clinical assessment, and intervention under Professor Ehsan Hoque , in collaboration with major medical cities and hospitals across Saudi Arabia.
Nov 2025 — May 2026 Dhaka, Bangladesh
Adjunct Lecturer
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
Designed and taught labs, assessments, and sessional materials for Data Structures and Algorithms, Database Systems, and Digital Logic Design while mentoring students through direct academic guidance.
Background
Education & honors
Academic training and selected distinctions in research, scholarship, and technical leadership.
Education
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering
CGPA 3.91 / 4.00 · Three Dean’s List awards
Jhenaidah Cadet College
Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC)
GPA 5.00 / 5.00 · 5th in Jessore Board · Talent-pool scholarship
Selected honors
Best Paper Award Nomination
Beyond Accuracy · AI in Healthcare Conference
Richard E. Merwin Student Scholarship
Sole Fall 2023 recipient from Bangladesh
Dean’s List Student Award · three consecutive years
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
Champion, Deep Learning Sprint 2.0
Document layout analysis competition
Champion, DataVerse Challenge
Bengali text-to-IPA challenge
IEEE Xtreme 16.0
1st in Bangladesh