About Me

I am an AI Researcher and Part-time Faculty member in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at United International University (UIU). Previously, I worked as a Software Engineer in the core Machine Learning team at Apurba Technologies Ltd., where I focused on building scalable ML services and VLM-based OCR systems.

My primary research interests lie at the intersection of Multi-modal Learning and Multimodal AI Safety. Specifically, I am interested in:

  • Multi-modal Representation Learning: Aligning representations across vision, text, and audio.
  • Multi-modal AI Safety & Alignment: Evaluating and defending against adversarial threats on video/multimodal media.
  • VLM-based Document Processing: Developing advanced architectures for Bengali Optical Character Recognition and low-resource LLM pipelines.

Note: You can also trigger my printer-friendly CV instantly by pressing Ctrl + P or Cmd + P anywhere on this site.

Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering

United International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
2020 — 2024

CGPA: 3.77/4.00 (Distinction: Cum Laude) | Major CGPA: 4.00/4.00 (Data Science)

Thesis: AVLoS: Audio-Visual Long Text Scene Summarization

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Swakkhar Shatabda

Publications

Journal

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

S M Jishanul Islam, Sahid Hossain Mustakim, Musfirat Hossain, Mysun Mashira, Nur Islam Shourav, MD. Rayhan Ahmed, Salekul Islam, Swakkhar Shatabda, and A.K.M. Muzahidul Islam.

Knowledge-Based Systems (Elsevier), 2026.

Elsevier Q1 Impact Factor: 7.6 CiteScore: 15
Conference

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

S M Jishanul Islam, Md. Mehedi Hasan, Masbul Haider Ovi, AKM Shahariar Azad Rabby, and Fuad Rahman.

In the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) Industry Track. ACL, 2026.

EACL 2026 ACL Archive
Conference

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

Md. Mehedi Hasan, S M Jishanul Islam, AKM Shahariar Azad Rabby, and Fuad Rahman.

In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData). IEEE, 2025.

IEEE BigData 2025
Conference

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

Sadia Ahmmed, S M Jishanul Islam, Sahid Hossain Mustakim, Ridwan Arefin Islam, Subangkar Karmaker Shanto, and Salekul Islam.

In TENCON 2025 - 2025 IEEE Region 10 Conference (TENCON). IEEE, 2025.

IEEE TENCON 2025
Conference

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

Sadia Ahmmed, Taimur Rahman, S M Jishanul Islam, Al-Momen Reyad, Sonjoy Dey, and Md. Dewan Farid.

In 2024 6th International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Information & Communication Technology (ICEEICT), pp. 664-669. IEEE, 2024.

ICEEICT 2024
Workshop

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

Sahid Hossain Mustakim*, S M Jishanul Islam*, Ummay Maria Muna*, Montasir Chowdhury*, Mohammed Jawwadul Islam, Sadia Ahmmed, Tashfia Sikder, Syed Tasdid Azam Dhrubo, and Swakkhar Shatabda.

Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, pp. 2955-2964, 2025.

ICCV 2025 Workshop * Equal Contribution
Workshop

MIMIC: Multimodal Islamophobic Meme Identification and Classification

S M Jishanul Islam, Sahid Hossain Mustakim, Sadia Ahmmed, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Swapnil Khandoker, Syed Tasdid Azam Dhrubo, and Nahid Hossain.

3rd Muslims in ML Workshop – NeurIPS, 2024.

NeurIPS 2024 Workshop

Experience

Oct 2025 — Present

Part-time Faculty

United International University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • Teaching core applied computer science courses, focusing on algorithms and software engineering.
  • Collaborating with the department of CSE to grade, provide constructive feedback, evaluate student performances, and provide industry insights to enrich course outlines.
  • Coordinating with Teaching Assistants (TAs) to create unified course materials and lab outlines.
Dec 2024 — Oct 2025

Software Engineer

Apurba Technologies Ltd.
Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • Engineered scalable, robust, and optimized core ML inference services, resulting in a 10% performance speedup.
  • Co-created the first CLIP-style word recognizer for VLM-based Bengali OCR, achieving a word-level accuracy of 95%+.
  • Collaborated within a cross-functional ML research team to complete, document, and present critical project deliverables 2-3 weeks ahead of scheduled deadlines.
Jun 2024 — Oct 2024

Lecturer (Contractual)

United International University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • Delivered lectures and conducted laboratory sessions for core Computer Science courses.
  • Designed and graded examinations, assignments, and projects to evaluate performance and provide feedback, improving students' average lab performance by 7%.
  • Courses Conducted: Object-Oriented Programming Lab, Data Structures and Algorithms 1 Lab, and Database Management Systems Theory.
Sep 2023 — May 2024

Undergraduate Assistant

United International University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • Facilitated course content delivery and prepared hands-on laboratory exercises in coordination with department faculties.
  • Evaluated assessments, supervised weekly lab submissions, and served as a panel judge for student projects.
  • Authored and structured the country's first-ever undergraduate course materials for the newly introduced Data Science program.
  • Courses Supervised: Programming for Data Science, and Object-Oriented Programming for Data Science.

Recent News

Mar 2026

📚 Our journal paper "An audio video-based multi-modal fusion approach for speech emotion recognition" has been accepted for publication in Knowledge-Based Systems (Elsevier)! (Q1 Journal, Impact Factor: 7.6).

Jan 2026

🎉 Our paper "BornoDrishti: Leveraging Vision Encoders and Domain-Adaptive Learning for Bangla OCR on Diverse Documents" has been accepted at the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026) Industry Track!

Nov 2025

🚀 Our paper on Bangla punctuation restoration "Beyond Characters: Position-Aware Metric and a Lightweight LLM for Low-Resource Bangla Punctuation Restoration" has been accepted at IEEE BigData 2025!

Oct 2025

💼 Pleased to announce that I have joined United International University (UIU) as a Part-time Faculty member, teaching core Computer Science and Software Engineering courses!

Oct 2025

🏆 Honored to receive the "Best Performing Engineer" award for Project SD-12 from the leadership team at Apurba Technologies Ltd.

Apr 2025

🥇 We won the Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab Hackathon 2025 (Dhaka Hub) for our project HAVEN, a BCI-powered speech-to-speech emotional agent!

Nov 2024

🔥 Our paper "MIMIC: Multimodal Islamophobic Meme Identification and Classification" was accepted and presented at the 3rd Muslims in ML Workshop at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver, Canada!

Jun 2024

✈️ Travelled to Boston, USA to participate as a global finalist in the Hult Prize Summit 2024 representing UIU!

Mar 2024

🏆 Won Champion at the Bhashamul: Bengali Regional Text to IPA National NLP Datathon! Our team solved Bengali regional IPA transcription.

Nov 2023

🌍 Travelled to Switzerland and won the prestigious Gold Award (World Champion) at the International Blockchain Olympiad (IBCOL 2023) in Lauterbrunnen!

Projects

Research Projects

Bangla OCR (BornoDrishti)

A novel Vision-Language model (VLM) framework and domain-adaptive learning strategy for optical character recognition of diverse, complex Bengali documents. Associated with Apurba Technologies Ltd.

PyTorch VLMs Transformers Domain Adaptation

BhaShammo

Solving regional IPA transcription in Bangla using Dialect Guided Tokens (DGT). Won 1st place in the Bhashamul National NLP Datathon.

Python HuggingFace PyTorch Speech-to-IPA

Engineering & Hackathon Projects

NurtureAid

Real-time AI-based caretaking mobile app simplifying aged care through caretakers. Full-stack development including backend and AI engine.

React Native Node.js Flask MongoDB Firebase LLaMA-Index

HAVEN

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) powered mental health speech-to-speech conversational agent recognizing and responding with emotions. Won Harvard HSIL Hackathon Dhaka Hub.

Python OpenAI API Emotiv EEG Firebase Streamlit

IPBlocks

Web3 decentralized app for Intellectual Property protection, licensing, and marketplace. Led backend, frontend, and smart contract development. Won Gold at IBCOL 2023.

HTML/JS PHP PostgreSQL Solidity Truffle Ganache

Achievements & Awards

Gold Award (World Champion)

International Blockchain Olympiad (IBCOL 2023)

2023

Winner (Dhaka Hub)

Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab Hackathon

2025

Best Performing Engineer

Project SD-12, Apurba Technologies Ltd.

Oct 2025

National Champion

Bhashamul: Bengali Regional Text to IPA National NLP Datathon

2024

Academic Excellence Scholarship

United International University

2020 — 2024

Global Summit Participant

Hult Prize Global Summit (Boston, USA)

2024

Champion

Hult Prize OnCampus Round (UIU)

2024

Silver Award (1st Runner Up)

Bangladesh Blockchain Olympiad (BCOLBD 2023)

2023

1st Runner Up

Intra-University Deep Learning Sprint

2023

National Finalist

ICT Innovation Grant (for NurtureAid)

2023

Skills

Programming Languages

Python C++ C Java JavaScript PHP Solidity SQL

Machine Learning & Research

PyTorch TensorFlow Scikit-Learn HuggingFace NumPy & Pandas NLTK / NLP OpenCV

Frameworks & Databases

React.js Node.js FastAPI Spring Boot PostgreSQL MongoDB MySQL Firebase

DevOps & Tools

Git GitHub Docker Bash / Shell LaTeX

Extracurriculars & Media

  • UIU Computer Club (UIUCC) General Secretary (2022 — 2024)

    Led club activities, organized multiple national hackathons, managed a committee of 50+ members, and directed workshops for 1000+ students.

  • National TV Feature (Jamuna TV) Watch Interview

    Interviewed by Jamuna TV on our team's triumph at IBCOL 2023 in Switzerland and the potential of blockchain technology in Bangladesh.

  • Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Workshop Co-Trainer (Collaborative Event)

    Conducted a hands-on workshop on ASR models hosted by Bengali.AI and the Islamic University of Technology (IUT) Computer Society.

  • dApp Development Workshop Lead Trainer

    Led a hands-on workshop on building decentralized applications (dApps) from scratch for the students of United International University.