S M Jishanul Islam Webpage

About

Research that leaves the lab.

I am a master’s student in Computer Science at Dalhousie University, supervised by Prof. Dr. Frank Rudzicz, and an AI Engineer at pipikwan pêhtâkwan, where I train and serve AI built to corrects unconscious bias or racism directed to Indigenous Peoples in written materials.

Before Canada I did my undergraduate in Computer Science and Engineering at United International University in Dhaka, majoring in Data Science - a perfect 4.00 in the major, Cum Laude overall — and spent a year building production OCR and vision-language systems at Apurba Technologies. I used to also teach at my Alma Mater, part-time, because the questions students ask are the ones worth answering.

My published work runs from tri-modal adversarial attacks on short video to Bangla OCR on documents nobody else would touch. The through-line is the same: several signals, one understanding. During my master's, I am trying to make medical AI understand hierarchy in medical ontologies and help them ACTUALLY see, read, and hear.

Education

Where I learned it.

Master’s in Computer Science
2026 — Present

Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Frank Rudzicz
B.Sc. in Computer Science & Engineering
2020 — 2024

United International University Dhaka, Bangladesh

Major in Data Science · Cum Laude · Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Swakkhar Shatabda

3.77/4.00CGPA

4.00/4.00Major CGPA

Experience

Where I’ve built things.

AI Engineer
Oct 2025 — Present

pipikwan pêhtâkwan Edmonton, Canada (remote)
- Trained LLMs for multi-purpose tasks serving Indigenous Peoples, reaching a state-of-the-art 86% BERT F1.
- Built inference pipelines for billion-parameter models at scale, cutting time-to-first-token to 1 second.
- Led the training of the first thinking model built to serve Indigenous Peoples.
- Work alongside the software engineering team to fold LLM pipelines into AI-powered sub-products.
Part-time Faculty
Oct 2025 — July 2026

United International University Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Teach core applied CS courses as faculty from industry, centred on algorithms and software engineering.
- Work with the CSE department on grading, feedback and performance reporting, bringing industry perspective back into the courses.
- Coordinate with TAs on course materials and outline design.
Software Engineer
Dec 2024 — Oct 2025

Apurba Technologies Ltd. Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Built scalable, optimised core ML services, improving performance by 10%.
- Co-created the first CLIP-style word recogniser for VLM-based Bengali OCR, at 95%+ accuracy.
- Worked with stakeholders to research and deliver project milestones two to three weeks ahead of deadline.
Lecturer (contractual)
Jun 2024 — Oct 2024

United International University Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Taught core CS concepts, raising average student performance by 7% through examination and targeted feedback.
- Courses: Object-Oriented Programming Lab, Data Structures & Algorithms I Lab, Database Management Systems (Theory).
Undergraduate Assistant
Sep 2023 — May 2024

United International University Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Facilitated course content with lab faculty, evaluated assessments and judged lab projects.
- Wrote the first course materials for the country’s first undergraduate degree in Data Science.
- Courses supervised: Programming for Data Science, Object-Oriented Programming for Data Science.

Publications

Answering one question.

How do you get a model to understand something when the evidence arrives in more than one form?

Journals

Q1 IF 8.0

An audio video-based multi-modal fusion approach for speech emotion recognition

Islam, S. M., Mustakim, S. H., Hossain, M., Mashira, M., Shourav, N. I., Ahmed, M. R., Islam, S., Islam, A. K. M., & Shatabda, S.

Knowledge-Based Systems (Elsevier) · 2026

Conferences

CORE A

BornoDrishti: Leveraging Vision Encoders and Domain-Adaptive Learning for Bangla OCR on Diverse Documents

Islam, S. M., Hassan, M., Ovi, M. H., Rabby, A. K. M., & Rahman, F.

19th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL), Industry Track · ACL, 2026
CORE B

Beyond Characters: Position-Aware Metric and a Lightweight LLM for Low-Resource Bangla Punctuation Restoration

Hassan, M., Islam, S. M., Rabby, A. K. M., & Rahman, F.

IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData) · IEEE, 2025
CORE C

IPBlocks: A Blockchain Ecosystem for Secure IP Registration and Decentralized Marketplace

Ahmmed, S., Islam, S. M., Mustakim, S. H., Islam, R., Shanto, S. K., & Islam, S.

TENCON 2025 — IEEE Region 10 Conference · IEEE, 2025
E-MedViTR: Enhanced Vision Transformers with Registers for Biomedical Image Classification

Ahmmed, S., Rahman, T., Islam, S. M., Reyad, A. M., Dey, S., & Farid, D. M.

6th International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Information & Communication Technology (ICEEICT) · IEEE, 2024

Workshops

CORE A* workshop

Watch, Listen, Understand, Mislead: Tri-modal Adversarial Attacks on Short Videos for Content Appropriateness Evaluation

Mustakim, S. H., Islam, S. M., Muna, U. M., Chowdhury, M., Islam, M. J., Ahmmed, S., Sikder, T., Dhrubo, S. T. A., & Shatabda, S.

IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops · 2025, pp. 2955–2964
CORE A* workshop

MIMIC: Multimodal Islamophobic Meme Identification and Classification

Islam, S. M., Mustakim, S. H., Ahmmed, S., Sayeedi, M. F. A., Khandoker, S., Dhrubo, S. T. A., & Hossain, N.

3rd Muslims in ML Workshop — NeurIPS · 2024

View the full list on Google Scholar

Selected projects

Built end to end.

NurtureAid

A real-time, AI-assisted mobile application that simplifies elder and dependent care through caretakers. I led both backend and frontend as the full-stack engineer.

React Native
Node.js
Flask
MongoDB
Firebase
LLaMA-Index
PyTorch

Champion — UIU CSE Project Show, Software Engineering Laboratory
Champion — Hult Prize OnCampus, UIU
Selected for the Hult Prize Summit, Boston

Repository

Haven

A BCI-powered mental-health agent: speech to speech, reading emotion from the signal and answering in kind. I led the backend, frontend and AI work.

Python
OpenAI
Emotiv
Firebase
Streamlit

Winner — Harvard HSIL Hackathon, Dhaka Hub

Repository

Toolkit

What I reach for.

Programming

C
C++
Java
Python
JavaScript
PHP
SQL
Solidity

Machine learning

PyTorch
TensorFlow
Scikit-Learn
NumPy
Pandas
Matplotlib
NLTK
Hugging Face

Frameworks

React.js
Node.js
Spring Boot
FastAPI
Firebase

DevOps

Git
GitHub
Docker

And

Communication
Leadership
Design thinking
Public speaking

Achievements

A decent trophy shelf.

Winner — Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab Hackathon, Dhaka Hub2025
Best Performing Engineer — SD12 Project of the Government of Bangladesh, given by Apurba Technologies Ltd.2025
Academic Excellence Scholarship, United International University2020 — 2024
Champion — Bhashamul: Bengali Regional Text to IPA National NLP Datathon2024
Champion — Hult Prize OnCampus Round2024
Summit Participant — Hult Prize Summit, Boston, USA2024
Gold Award (Champion) — International Blockchain Olympiad (IBCOL)2023
Silver Award (1st Runner-Up) — Bangladesh Blockchain Olympiad (BCOLBD)2023
1st Runner-Up — Intra-University Deep Learning Sprint2023
Finalist — ICT Innovation Grant, for NurtureAid2023
Champion — Software Engineering Lab2023
Champion — Database Management Systems Lab2022
Champion — Advanced Object-Oriented Programming Lab2022

Beyond the work

Teaching, speaking, organising.

General Secretary, UIU Computer Club

Ran the university’s computer club through two academic years.
2022 — 2024
Interview — Jamuna TV

On the triumph of IBCOL 2023 and the future of blockchain in Bangladesh.
Watch
Trainer — Automatic Speech Recognition workshop

Hands-on session with Bengali.AI and the IUT Computer Society.
Details
Trainer — Building a dApp from scratch

Hands-on workshop for the UIU Computer Club.
Details

Contact

Let’s talk.

Open to research collaborations in hierarchical and multi-modal learning, and to conversations about putting models in front of real users.

jishanlion@gmail.com

S M Jishanul Islam

Research that leaves the lab.

Where I learned it.

Master’s in Computer Science

B.Sc. in Computer Science & Engineering

Where I’ve built things.

AI Engineer

Part-time Faculty

Software Engineer

Lecturer (contractual)

Undergraduate Assistant

Answering one question.

Journals

An audio video-based multi-modal fusion approach for speech emotion recognition

Conferences

BornoDrishti: Leveraging Vision Encoders and Domain-Adaptive Learning for Bangla OCR on Diverse Documents

Beyond Characters: Position-Aware Metric and a Lightweight LLM for Low-Resource Bangla Punctuation Restoration

IPBlocks: A Blockchain Ecosystem for Secure IP Registration and Decentralized Marketplace

E-MedViTR: Enhanced Vision Transformers with Registers for Biomedical Image Classification

Workshops

Watch, Listen, Understand, Mislead: Tri-modal Adversarial Attacks on Short Videos for Content Appropriateness Evaluation

MIMIC: Multimodal Islamophobic Meme Identification and Classification