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Hello, I'm

Sarfraz Ahmad

I'm a |

NLP Researcher at MBZUAI · Specializing in LLMs, fact-checking & reasoning · 5 years building AI solutions that matter.

Sarfraz Ahmad
NLP
LLM
AI
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Who I Am

I'm a dedicated Natural Language Processing researcher and data scientist with 5 years of hands-on experience in AI, machine learning, and NLP-driven research. Currently pursuing my M.S. in NLP at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi with a GPA of 3.83.

My research focuses on fact-checking, temporal reasoning, and spatial reasoning — areas where I believe AI can have a transformative real-world impact. I'm passionate about pushing the boundaries of what LLMs can understand and reason about.

Beyond research, I have extensive industry experience building scalable data pipelines, AI systems, and full-stack applications that have served enterprise clients across the US and UAE.

0 + Years Experience
0 + Projects Built
0 Publications
0 /400 MBZUAI GPA

Education

M.S. Natural Language Processing

Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI (MBZUAI)

Abu Dhabi, UAE  |  2024 – 2026

GPA: 3.83 / 4.00

B.S. Electrical Engineering (CS Major)

University of Engineering & Technology (UET)

Lahore, Pakistan  |  2016 – 2020

GPA: 3.49 / 4.00

Where I've Worked

Lead Data Scientist

GoPython Software Solutions → Prognos Health Inc

Chatham, NJ, USA  |  Jun 2021 – Sep 2024

3 yrs 4 mo
  • Developed automated data transformation pipelines delivering critical insights on large-scale healthcare datasets.
  • Led migration of the organization's data ingestion system to an advanced pipeline, drastically improving processing capabilities.
  • Redefined client data schema to align with the OMOP Common Data Model standard for interoperability.
  • Built automated frameworks using AWS Lambda for managing large volumes of web files via scraping.
  • Created a query handler using Fluent Interface architecture in Python, streamlining complex query processes.
PythonAWS LambdaOMOP CDMData PipelinesHealthcare AI

Front-End Developer

GoPython Software Solutions → Instant Labs Inc

Chatham, NJ, USA  |  Nov 2020 – May 2021

7 mo
  • Built a drag-and-drop web app with React.js for creating and visualizing complex database schemas.
  • Designed a web tool using Blockly + React.js that dynamically generated and executed SQL queries at runtime.
  • Engineered backend RESTful APIs in Go for seamless frontend-backend integration.
React.jsGoBlocklyRESTful APIs

Research Officer

Data Science Lab, Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science

Lahore, Pakistan  |  Jan 2020 – Sep 2020

9 mo
  • Developed advanced Explainability & Interpretability models for AI systems, improving transparency in decision-making.
  • Automated clinical coding processes with ML models, increasing coding accuracy and efficiency.
  • Implemented PSO, PCA, and SVD algorithms to enhance model performance and reduce computational complexity.
XAIClinical NLPPSOPCASVD

Research Intern

Data Science Lab, KICS & Sabz Qalam

Lahore, Pakistan  |  Oct 2019 – Jun 2020

~9 mo
  • Explored NLP libraries (NLTK, SpaCy), word embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe) and deep learning frameworks.
  • Published a peer-reviewed research article on Metabolic Syndrome; contributed to research on Metastatic Breast Cancer and Uveal Melanoma.
NLPPyTorchTensorFlowMedical Research

Publications

2026
Conference · ACL'26

TABVERSE: Benchmarking Cross-Format Table Understanding in LLMs and VLMs

Ahsan, M., Ahmad, S., Hee, M.S., Lee, R.K.W. & Nakov, P.

arXiv preprint · Annual Meeting of the ACL 2026.

Table UnderstandingLLMsVLMsBenchmarking
Conference · ACL'26

SAHM: A Benchmark for Arabic Financial and Shari'ah-Compliant Reasoning

Elbadry, R., Ahmad, S., Heakl, A., Bouch, D., et al.

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2026.

Arabic NLPFinancial ReasoningBenchmarkingLLMs
Preprint · arXiv'26

UrduMMLU: A Massive Multitask Benchmark for Urdu Language Understanding

Tabassum, A., Ahmad, S., Iqbal, H., Aijaz, O., Ahsan, M. & Nakov, P.

arXiv preprint, 2026.

Urdu NLPMMLUBenchmarkingLLMs
Conference · ACL'26

Cultural Benchmarking of LLMs in Standard and Dialectal Arabic Dialogues

Al Kautsar, M.D., Almheiri, S., Ahsan, M., Elbouardi, B., Ahmad, S., et al.

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2026.

Arabic DialectsCultural NLPLLMs
Preprint · arXiv'26

A Parallel Cross-Lingual Benchmark for Multimodal Idiomaticity Understanding

Torunouglu-Selamet, D., Arslan, D., Ahmad, S., et al. (56 collaborators)

arXiv preprint, 2026.

MultimodalIdiomaticityCross-lingual
Conference · ECIR'26

ImageCLEF 2026: Multimodal Challenges in Medicine, Science, Agritech, and Security

Ionescu, B., Müller, H., Stanciu, D.C., Ahmad, S., et al. (48 collaborators)

European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 2026.

ImageCLEFMultimodalBenchmarking
2025
Journal · JMB'25

iBitter-Stack: A Multi-Representation Ensemble Learning Model for Accurate Bitter Peptide Identification

Ahmad, S., Ahsan, M., Asim, M., Dengel, A. & Malik, M.I.

Journal of Molecular Biology, 2025.

BioinformaticsPeptide ClassificationEnsemble Learning
Workshop · BEA'25 @ ACL

NeuralNexus at BEA 2025 Shared Task: Retrieval-Augmented Prompting for Mistake Identification in AI Tutors

Naeem, N., Ahmad, S., Ahsan, M. & Iqbal, H.

20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025).

RAGEducational NLPAI Tutors
Overview · CLEF'25

Overview of ImageCLEF 2025 — Multimodal Reasoning

Dimitrov, D., Hee, M.S., Xie, Z., Das, R.J., Ahmad, S., et al.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2025.

ImageCLEFMultimodal ReasoningLow-resource NLP
2023 & Earlier
Journal · CCADD'23

Unearthing Insights into Metabolic Syndrome by Linking Drugs, Targets, and Gene Expressions Using Similarity Measures and Graph Theory

Zafar, A., Wajid, B., Shabbir, A., Awan, F.G., Ahsan, M., Ahmad, S., Wajid, I., Anwar, F. & Mazhar, F.

Current Computer-Aided Drug Design, Vol. 20, Issue 6, pp. 773–783. DOI: 10.2174/1573409920666230817101913

Metabolic SyndromeGraph TheoryDrug Discovery
Book

Linux Programming for the Faint of Heart

Sobahi, N., Al-Rashed, F., Shabbir, A., Ahmad, S., Jamil, M. & Wajid, B.

Sabz Qalam, Vol. 1, p. 167. ISBN: 978-969-7941-00-1

LinuxSystems Programming

Things I've Built

ImageCLEF 2025: Multimodal Reasoning

Curated a high-quality Urdu MCQ image dataset for multimodal reasoning. Developed baselines using VLMs and LLMs for cross-modal understanding in low-resource languages.

VLMsLLMsMultimodalUrdu NLP
Organizer & Contributor · ImageCLEF 2025

LLM-based Structured Text Evaluation

Investigated limitations of ROUGE/entity metrics. Proposed structure-aware LLM evaluation at node, argument, and claim levels for long-form AI-generated content.

LLMEvaluationROUGEStructured Text
Semester Project · MBZUAI 2025

COVID-19 Severity Classification via scRNA-seq

ML pipeline leveraging single-cell RNA sequencing data to classify COVID-19 severity. Used PCA + SVM; identified gene biomarkers (RSAD2, CXCL10, S100A8) via SHAP.

scRNA-seqSVMSHAPBioinformatics
Semester Project · MBZUAI 2025

Multilingual Hate Speech Detection

Evaluated hate speech detection in German, Hindi, and English using traditional ML and advanced LLMs, demonstrating LLM superiority in low-resource multilingual settings.

LLMsHate SpeechMultilingualNLP
Semester Project · MBZUAI 2024

Peptide Classification with LLM Embeddings

Ensemble of LLM embeddings and CNNs for peptide classification, achieving state-of-the-art results for Anti-Viral Peptides without handcrafted features.

CNNLLM EmbeddingsBioinformatics
Semester Project · MBZUAI 2024

Breast Cancer Histopathology Classification

Transfer learning with DenseNet-201 for binary classification of histopathology images, achieving ~87% accuracy across multiple magnification levels.

DenseNet-201Transfer LearningMedical Imaging
Freelance · 2022

Multi-Label Emotion Classification

Evaluated 8 ML + 3 DL algorithms for multi-label emotion classification. Custom BERT with RoBERTa embeddings achieved macro F1 of 0.73 on Go-Emotions Dataset.

BERTRoBERTaEmotion Detection
Freelance · 2021

COVID-19 Exploratory Data Analysis

Cleaned and analyzed global COVID-19 data. Created interactive graphs and 3D geo-scatter plots to visualize global spread patterns over time.

PandasSeabornEDAPlotly
Freelance · 2021

Drag-and-Drop DB Schema Builder

React.js web app enabling users to visually create and connect complex database schemas. Paired with a Blockly-based tool generating SQL queries dynamically at runtime.

React.jsBlocklyGoSQL
Instant Labs Inc · 2020–2021

What I Work With

Programming

PythonC++JavaScript GoJavaScala

AI / ML / NLP

PyTorchTensorFlowTransformers Scikit-learnKerasOpenCV NLTKSpaCy

Cloud & DevOps

AWSAzureDocker KubernetesTerraformDatabricks

Web Technologies

ReactAngularVue 3 Node.jsHTML/CSS

Data & Databases

PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDB Apache SparkPandasNumPy

Research

LLMsFact-CheckingTemporal Reasoning XAIData AnalysisAcademic Writing

Domain Expertise

NLP & Large Language Models

Fact-checking, temporal & spatial reasoning, multilingual benchmarking, agentic pipelines, and evaluation frameworks for LLMs.

5+Years
12Publications
8+NLP Projects
HuggingFacePyTorchNLTKSpaCyvLLM

Data Engineering & ML

End-to-end ML pipelines, OMOP CDM data modelling, AWS-driven automation, and enterprise healthcare data systems at scale.

4Years
3Enterprise Clients
10+ML Models
AWS LambdaDatabricksSparkScikit-learnPandas

Research & Benchmarking

Designing shared tasks, curating datasets, building evaluation pipelines, and publishing in top-tier NLP venues.

3Shared Tasks
ACLEMNLP · CLEF
5+Datasets
Experimental DesignStatistical AnalysisAcademic Writing

Full-Stack & Cloud

React/Go web apps, RESTful APIs, Docker/Kubernetes orchestration, and cloud-native solutions across AWS and Azure.

3+Years
3Web Apps Built
AWS · AzureCloud
ReactGoDockerKubernetesTerraform

Technologies & Tools

Python PyTorch HuggingFace TensorFlow Transformers React.js AWS Docker Go Scikit-learn Pandas Apache Spark PostgreSQL MongoDB Kubernetes Terraform Azure NLTK SpaCy Databricks OpenCV Node.js Git Tableau MATLAB C++ JavaScript Scala

Get In Touch

I'm always open to discussing new research opportunities, collaborations, or interesting projects in NLP and AI. Whether you have a question or just want to say hello, my inbox is always open.

Location Abu Dhabi, UAE