Muhammad Omer Raza

Machine Learning Researcher & Engineer

From: Lahore, Pakistan

Machine Learning Researchist
Robust background in Software Engineering and MLOps.
Eager to contribute to cutting-edge ML research.
Feel free to connect on my social networks, collaborate or just geek out over ML!

Open for Research collaboration
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence

Skills

Jobs & Research

Research Assistant Machine Learning

CIVS

October 2023 - now

  • Silicon content prediction via ML in blast furnace
    • 90% Accuracy
    • Research paper accepted
    • Energy efficiency because of good silicon predictability implies immense economic impact.
  • Hearth erosion modeling
    • Implemented first principle heat transfer models (forward)
    • Engineered optimization flow (inverse process) via tuning, choosing step sizes, making manifolds smooth and choosing the best optimization algorithms
    • ML state models and ROMs used fasten computation from 5-10 minutes per 1 forward iteration to 10 seconds
    • Research paper underway
Technologies:

Research Assistant (Remote)

HKUST

April 2024 - August 2024

NLP & Efficient LLM research with a publication in EMNLP 2024

Technologies:

Research Assistant (Remote)

CUHK

October 2022 - April 2023

  • Computer Vision & Attention Mechanisms in Medical Imaging and Live Surgical Feeds.
  • Research Published in IEEE
Technologies:

Machine Learning Engineer

Lalamove

March 2022 - July 2023

  • Improved image localization & detection models for accurate market penetration count - 90% accuracy & 70,000 USD savings
  • Developed image detection models, OCR & clustering models for real-time license plate number detection - prompt bonus delivery and minimal manual intervention with associated costs
  • Established data pipeline, modeling and deployment flow for risk assessment models to predict fraud - prototype deployed (0.95 F1 score) that handled tens of thousands of transactions daily.
  • Received the highest bonus in the year (4 people among 150 in the office)
Technologies:

Software & Machine Learning Engineer

Gense Technologies

November 2020 - February 2022

  • Developed LSTM and Conv1D models for breathing waveform pattern classification. - improved final EIT lung diagnosis
  • Developed & deployed EIT Amplitude Image Classifier using two distinct iterative improvement approaches - improved final EIT diagnosis.
  • Developed & deployed Gense Mobile App
    • User account Management
    • Live Test sync with Backend Server
    • Test results storage & visualization
  • Published a research paper in IEEE

Frontend Developer - Commissioned Work

Beardbee

February 2020 - April 2020

  • Worked on User Input UI of a charging system
  • Produced maintainable, reusable and and portable code using Electron & React for:
    • Web
    • Desktop
    • Mobile (IOS & Android)
Technologies:

Tech Intern - Full Stack Developer

Lalamove

June 2019 - August 2019

  • Refactored microservice responsible for grouping orders, reading client inputs
    and forming routes
  • Microservice in various countries and cities like Malaysia, India & Bangkok
Technologies:

Tech Intern - Backend Developer

GoTalents

December 2017 - March 2018

  • Backend database & functionality setup
    • basic user notification & news feed
    • location mapping
    • messaging
Technologies:

Publications & Preprint

Silicon Content Prediction in Blast Furnace via Machine Learning: A Comprehensive Processing and Modeling Pipeline

Contribution: First Author
Status: Accepted in MDPI Materials Journal Special Edition 2025
  • Forecast silicon content with 90 % accuracy owing to:
    • Comprehensive data processing pipeline for large scale industrial data
    • Hyperparameter optimization
    • Model Selection involving NN, Xgboost & Time series Models
Blast Furnace
Silicon Content
Xgboost
Time Series Models

FIRST: Teach A Reliable Large Language Model Through Efficient Trustworthy Distillation

Contribution: Co-Author
Status: Accepted in EMNLP 2024
  • Pipeline for efficient LLM training for:
    • Reduced Miscalibration -10%
    • Improved Accuracy +2.3%
  • Distillation with trustworthy maximization process
  • Substantially reduced training data size
Efficient LLM
Llama
NLP

SR-TGAN: Smoke Removal with Temporal Generative Adversarial Models in Robot-assisted Surgery

Contribution: Equal contribution Co-first Author
Status: Accepted in IEEE EMBS BHI 2024
  • Improved smoke removal in live surgical feeds using sequence of frames
  • Separate Temporal Mechanisms compared in CycleGAN base skeleton:
    • Attention
    • Convolution
    • LSTM
  • • Better smoke removal than benchmark DeSmoke CycleGAN model based on the JNBM & FADE metrics.
Computer Vision
CycleGAN
Attention Mechanism
Medical Imaging

CycleGAN with mutual information loss constraint generates structurally aligned CT images from functional EIT images

Contribution: First Author
Status: Accepted in IEEE EMBC 2023
  • Modified CycleGAN archictecture
  • Converted low resolution EIT images to high resolution CT images
  • Mutual Information loss construction yielded structurally aligned generated CT images
  • Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) gain from 0.2600 to 0.2621, (p<0.0001) from vanilla approach
Computer Vision
CycleGAN
Mutual Information
Medical Imaging
Healthcare Diagnostics

Prior information inference via Mutual Information constrained cycleGAN enhances EIT reconstruction

Contribution: First Author
Status: Preprint TechRxiv, Results Pending IEEE JBH
  • An extension journal paper of IEEE EMBC paper
  • Incorporates modified CycleGAN to infer prior EIT image
  • Dynamic Prior yields a better final reconstructed EIT image
  • NMI gain from 0.45 to 0.49 from vanilla approach
Computer Vision
CycleGAN
Medical Imaging

Surgical Blender: A Synthetic Datat Generator for Robot-Assisted Surgery

Contribution: Second Author
Status: Results pending in CBM Journal
  • Experimented Improved metrics for CycleGAN using
    • Carefully crafted synthetic data
    • Custom IC & DC Losses
  • Potential to alleviate the load for acquiring real medical images in training tasks like smoke removal
Computer Vision
CycleGAN
Medical Imaging

Education

Masters degree in Computer Science

Purdue University Northwest

September 2023 - May 2025

• 4.0 GPA thus far ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Bachelors degree in Computer Science

The University of Hong Kong

September 2016 - May 2020

• First Class Honors
• Deans Honor List in 2016-2017 & 2019-2020
• HKU Foundation Scholarship 2016-2020 (for outstanding undergrads)
• Young Tsun Dart Scholarship 2017 (reserved for only one student in a particular year of study)

Bachelors degree in Computer Science

Tufts University

August 2018 - December 2018

• Exchange Program