Experience

• Research Intern
  Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory (MERL) |    Summer 2024 and 2025
  Summer 2024:  - Worked on two separate projects regarding Privacy and Robustness of LLMs. 

                                   -  First project discovered that machine unlearning can increase privacy leakage by ~35% in a downstream
                                      finetuned LLM. The other project introduced randomized embedding smoothing as a defense that
                                      enhances adversarial robustness of LLMs ~3x the baseline.    

                                -  Both projects respectively led to publications in AAAI’25 and NeurIPS’25

Summer 2025: -  Designed an improved variant of differential privacy for multi-modal language models, which is ~3.5x
                                      more efficient and provides ~2x greater utility with the same privacy budget compared to DP-SGD.

• Graduate Assistant | Half-Time
  - Serve as a Research Assistant (RA) in the Systems & Internet Infrastructure Security Laboratory (SIIS). 

- Research Focus: Security & Privacy of ML, Adversarial ML, LLM Safety, Federated Learning.

- 4 peer-reviewed publications (2 first-author) at top venues, with 3 under-review and 2 in progress. 

• Lecturer | Full-Time
  United International University, Bangladesh   |   July 2021 - July 2022
  Faculty Profile : https://cse.uiu.ac.bd/profiles/rashid/ 

• Software Engineer | Full-Time
  Reve Systems   |   Sep 2020 - May 2021
  Responsibility: Full Stack Web Development
  
  

• Research Worker | Contractual
  Samsung R&D Bangladesh   |   Aug 2019 - Nov 2019
  Worked in a project on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) development for Bengali language.

• P.hD. in Computer Science and Engineering  |  Expected Graduation 2027
  Pennsylvania State University,  State College, PA 16801, USA.
  
  

• Master's in Computer Science and Engineering  |  Graduated 2024
  Pennsylvania State University,  State College, PA 16801, USA.
  
  

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering  |  Graduated 2021
  Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka-1000, Bangladesh
  
  

• Professional Member in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)  | Member Number: 3442806
  
  

• PC Member in the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
  
  

• PC Member in the Eighth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics & Society