Hi, I'm Akib 👋
A versatile software engineer, researcher, and passionate debugger with a hint of depth and details.
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About Me

I developed both user facing applications and libraries that are used by other developers. Up until now, I contributed to the Hugging Face Transformers Library, developed Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocols to speed up communication between smartwatches and smartphones, and developed Python Library to test security solutions for IoT systems (or any distributed systems using security policy enforcement). Working at library layers made me adaptable to work with any programming language or framework swiftly and create tangible impact. Additionally, I developed a strong interest in digging deep into the system layer and find vulnerabilities in the system. I have worked extensively in the networking subsystem of Linux, AI/ML systems, distributed systems with a focus on safety and security. My security research has been published in IEEE CNS, and SecDev, and one of my poster is also published at USENIX security. Recently, I completed Masters in Computer Science from Syracuse University in New York. Before Syracuse University, I worked at Samsung Research.

Work Experience

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AI/ML Engineer
Open Source Contribution
Hugging Face Transformers

May 2025 - Aug 2025
TechX Labs
I contributed to the multi-modal chat_template processing pipeline and video pre-processing pipeline of the Hugging Face Transformers library. I also contributed to the test-suite of Vision Language Models (VLMs) including InternVL, QWEN2 family of VLMs.
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Research Intern
LLM Security
AI safety

Nov 2024 - July 2025
Syracuse University
My primary contribution can be summarized by the phrase "researching explainablity and security of LLMs". I worked on representation engineering, a method to observe and control behavior of LLMs as they generate responses. Using representation engineering, my goal was to reduce harmfull response generation of LLMs by finetuning foundational LLMs such as Mistral, and Lamma.
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Graduate Research Assistant
Network Security
Distributed Systems

Aug 2021 - May 2024
Syracuse University
My primary contribution can be summarized by the phrase "researching security of networked systems". A candidate networked system for my research was IoT systems, more specifically smart home/manufacturing systems. I developed a framework, dubbed VetIoT, to automatically test efficacy of security solutions proposed for IoT systems. Furthermore, I conducted security analysis of networking subsystem of Linux kernel. I created a framework to emulate software defined networking (SDN) using containers. I replicated various attacks on layer-2 (Mac), layer-3 (IP), and layer-4 (TCP) protocols. Implemented data leak attacks aginst VPN client applications (Nord, Keepsolid etc.) and built-in vpn configurators on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows. As a fun project, I also developed kernel modules to create my own firewall based on linux netfilter hooks.
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Graduate Teaching Assistant
Operating Systems

Aug 2022 - May 2024
Syracuse University
I tutored fundamental concepts of operating systems (OS) such process handling, system call, multi-processing to both undergraduate and graduate students. To teach these concepts in a hands-on manner, I utilized an educational operating system called NachOS. I also built scripts to automatically validate (grade) students implementation of OS concepts in NachOS.
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Software Engineer
iOS & Android Development
Embedded Linux

May 2019 - Aug 2021
Samsung R&D Institute Bangladesh
My primary contribution was developing a software update mechanism for smartwatches using internet from the companion smartphone application. For this feature, I developed a custom Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transport protocol to transfer the watch software, from the smartphone to watch, over BLE. I implmeneted this feature on both iOS and Android version of Samsung Heartwise project. Moreover, I developed custom file-logging libraries, on both iOS and Android, to aid developers and testers in tracking software issues. Apart from mobile application development, I developed remote procedure call (rpc) mechanism on tizen (an embedded linux) OS.

Skill Map

Application Layer
Systems And Networking
Open Source

My Open Source Contributions

I actively contribute to open source projects, focusing on AI/ML libraries, security tools, and networking frameworks. These contributions help me stay connected with the developer community and improve software that benefits everyone.

Hugging Face Transformers

Hugging Face Transformers

Contributed to the multi-modal chat_template processing pipeline and video pre-processing pipeline. Enhanced test-suite for Vision Language Models (VLMs) including InternVL and QWEN2 family of VLMs. Improved the library's capabilities for handling video and image-text interactions.

Python
AI/ML
Multi-modal
VLM
Transformers
Software Defined Networking (SDN) Emulator

Software Defined Networking (SDN) Emulator

SEED Emulator is a python framework that emulates operations of a real world internet. I am developing a module of the emulator which emulates oeprations of the SDN. In my implementation, I am using faucet (formarly known as RYU) as SDN controller and OpenVSwitch as virtual sdn enabled switch.

SDN Controller
BGP
OpenVSwitch
Python
Docker
VetIoT

VetIoT

A framework to automatically test efficacy of security solutions proposed for IoT systems. With this framework researchers or developers of IoT security solutions can automatically generate test-cases and evaluate efficacy of their solutions and compare them with existing similar solutions intuitively. A regular user of IoT system can use VetIoT to pin-point security issues in the system and develop security policies for that.

Python3
Antlr G4
Shell Script
Docker
Vagrant
My Projects

Check out my latest work

I have worked on a variety of projects ranging from full-stack web development to wifi firmware analysis. Some of my projects are closed source. These are the projects I worked on during my time at Samsung Research. One of the project's website is publicly available Samsung Heartwise. Most of my remaining project's are open source. Some of the most recent projects are mentioned here.

Breaking circuit breakers

Breaking circuit breakers

Implemented embedding space attacks to bypass circuit breaker defense mechanisms in LLMs. Developed programs that find embedding matrices to trick fine-tuned LLMs into not recognizing harmful prompts, forcing them to generate harmful responses despite safety measures.

Pytorch
Transformers
LLM
OpenAIAPI
Discovering remote code execution (RCE) bugs in Wifi/Bluetooth combo firmware

Discovering remote code execution (RCE) bugs in Wifi/Bluetooth combo firmware

Broadcom Wifi/Bluetooth combo chip is used in many smartphones and laptops including iPhones, Samsung phones, and Macbooks. In this project, I emulated the firmware of the combo chip using qemu and fuzzed the firmware with randomly generated bluetooth packets. During fuzzing I found 2 CVEs: one crashing the firmware and another creating heap corruption error.

QEMU
Wireless Firmware Fuzzing
Linux Bluetooth Stack
Testing VPNs against leaking tunnel attack

Testing VPNs against leaking tunnel attack

VPN client applications or built-in VPN configurators of popular OSs can leak data outside of VPN tunnel. In this project, I created a malicious wifi network. If a user connects to this malicious wifi access point, I can force user's traffic to follow a path outside of the VPN tunnel. In a more perilious scenario, this attack can be formed remotely by pairing with a dns hijacking

VPN
Bypassing Tunnels
create_ap script
nginx
AWS
DNS Hijacking
Predicting arrival status of flights arriving at SYR airport 3 days earlier than actual arrival

Predicting arrival status of flights arriving at SYR airport 3 days earlier than actual arrival

Built a tree based machine learning model to predict arrival status of flights arriving at SYR (Hancock Internation) airport from JFK (New York, NY), MCO (Orlando,FL), and ORD (Chicago, IL). To increase accuracy, we incorporated both historical weather data and flight arrival data from transtats. During prediction, we dynamically injected weather forcasting data to query.

XGBoost
Hybrid Modeling
Regularization
Full Stack Project Management Website

Full Stack Project Management Website

Developed a Full-stack (front-end: React, Backend: Django) website with complete authentication and deployed it in AWS with apropriate scalability.

React.js
Django
PostgreSQL
Nginx
AWS EC2
AWS S3
Publications
    Honors And Awards
    • Google

      Google Cloud Research Credit

      Received Google Cloud Research Credit for my project (with Dr.Ashikuzzaman) on developing state of the art LLMs and VLMs for medical imaging

    • SRBD

      SRBD Icon of the Month

      Awarded for identifying and resolving a concurrency issue in the Samsung Heartwise mobile (both iOS and Android) Application.

    • Runner-Up:

      Runner-Up: Research Presentation

      Awarded for presenting my research on IoT security at ECS Research Day, Syracuse University

    • NSF

      NSF Student Travel Grant

      Awarded student travel grant to present my research on IoT security at the IEEE Conference on Communication and Security(CNS) at FL,USA.

    Contact

    Feel free to contact me using any of these links. Let's have a cup of coffee and a deep discussion.

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