Work
List of professional things I was involved in:
Andalusia
From 2020-2023, I co-founded Andalusia, serving as the Chief Technology Officer, where we made on-premise data analytics infrastructure software, catering specifically to the high-security and high-privacy needs of government clients. We engineered a cutting-edge infrastructure layer, integrating S3 distributed storage with Spark-based computation and offering interfaces for data scientists, analysts, and administrators. It was a basic (and elegant) alternative to cloud-based distributed data science infrastructure. My aim was to democratize data science to organizations that have drastically different requirements than the norm.
More details
Our solution stood out for its lightweight design, enabling rapid deployment and significantly reducing the time to operationalize data science tools and data integration - often within a matter of weeks. Navigating complex enterprise architecture, ensuring stringent compliance, and seamlessly integrating with diverse databases.
Beyond software development, we played a role in augmenting our clients' capabilities by provisioning expert data scientists and conducting comprehensive training programs. Our software was successfully deployed across multiple government agencies.
However, Andalusia faced growth challenges, leading to its closure in 2023. It was my biggest project so far, while I'm sad we ended up closing I'm very proud of the work we did at Andalusia, our tiny tech team provided outsized impact by providing enterprise infrastructure tooling similar to the popular cloud-based tools, and it was definitely a challenge worth pursuing.
Wasphi
From 2018-2020, I took on the role of tech lead at Wasphi (later renamed Averroes) and had the opportunity to work on several meaningful data consultancy projects. My role involved leading the development of user-friendly visualization dashboards, analyzing data from government agencies, setting up data analytics infrastructure both on-prem and on-cloud, and managing the requirements between the client and the larger tech team. I also worked on collecting some interesting alternative data and geodata from the public domain. Domains of the client work was diverse including labour market, trade, finance, social security, and econometrics.
Earlier
Have a master's degree from KAUST in Computer Science. Worked with Prof. Marco Canini of the SANDS group . Worked on side-channel attacks of Intel SGX's implementation in cloud environments, ended up publish a paper in ACM DEBS
Have a bachelor's degree from MIT in Computer Science and Engineering (6-3), was there 2012-2016.
Some cool classes I took were Cryptography, Algorithmic Game Theory, Security, and Photography!
Did a secure distributed Settlers of Catan version, when the stakes are just too high to build your roads
Interned with Foxtrot Systems just when they started and worked on developing a new version of their distribution algorithm
Interned with the Yahoo Paranoids working on integrating hardware authentication devices into the company's internal systems
Even Earlier
In high school, I qualified 1st nationally and competed in Intel ISEF 2010
I did some math Olympiad as well. Did well nationally. Got an Honorable Mention in the Asian Pacific Math Olympiad (APMO) 2011
I was lucky to join AwesomeMath, Shad, and Canada/USA Mathcamp