Ashkan's Website

Hi you! Welcome to my academic website! 

I like pasta and art, and follow a versatile daily workout routine 😎. My friends and family know me by my contagious smile. I think ... read more

I have been lately following the science of climate change and am deeply interested in helping the fight of climate crisis. Well, more urgently, I am now very interested in safe AI (making sure AI does not do harm or take over humanity). If you have an idea, let's talk!

More work-related, I am an AI Researcher in Yonsei University, the AI department. I am working on Safety and ethics in LLMs and LMMs.

Previously I was an AI Research Scientist at Meta AI (Facebook AI) and worked on deepfake detection and developed technologies for privacy-preserving machine learning and federated learning. I contributed to Opacus, an open-source library that enables training deep learning models with differential privacy, and FLSim, an open-source library for simulating federated learning systems.  I publish papers too.

I was a  Visiting Researcher at University of California, Berkeley and member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR). When I was at UC Berkeley, I contributed to FLOW, an open-source  deep reinforcement learning-enabled framework for simulation of autonomous and manned cars. 

I earned my PhD degree in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. My work was on the intersection of Computer Systems, Edge Computing, and Machine Learning, specifically, on improving quality of service in IoT and deep learning Applications through Fog Computing. I won the UT Dallas Best Dissertation Award. While at UT Dallas, I created Fog Computing Conference Hub.

I have been fortunate to have some of the most distinguished researchers as my advisors: Dr. Ilya Mironov, Dr. Mike Rabbat, Dr. Carole-Jean Wu, Dr. Alexandre Bayen, Dr. Jason Jue, and Dr. Zygmunt Haas.

I was TA and unoffical lecturer at UT Dallas, and two-time recipient of Best Teaching Assistant Award. I served as technical program committee for FL-ICML, FL-NeurIPS, AIChallengeIoT, and reviewer of several international journals and conferences, including ICML, NeurIPS, IEEE/ACM TON, IEEE TNSM, TMC, NETWORK, TSC, IoTJ, INFOCOM, and ICDCS.

Prior to all these, I was a web-design freelancer for several years ... read more