ABOUT / KHAWAJA
A researcher.
An engineer.
Always a student.
I am a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology. I work as a Graduate Research Assistant in the Khojasteh Autonomous Systems Laboratory under the supervision ofDr. Mohammad Javad Khojasteh.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Protecting models. Coordinating robots.
My research spans machine learning security and autonomous systems. In machine learning security, I work on anti-distillation defenses that protect deployed models against extraction attacks.
My work in autonomous systems is driven by the goal of developing highly coordinated multi-agent robots for search-and-rescue in disaster-struck regions.
I received my M.S. in Artificial Intelligence from RIT in 2026 as a Fulbright Scholar. During my master's, I worked as a Software Development Engineer Intern for AI/ML at Amazon Web Services in Palo Alto in summer 2025.
Education
PhD · Electrical & Computer Engineering
Rochester Institute of Technology · KAS Lab
M.S. · Artificial Intelligence
Rochester Institute of Technology · Fulbright Scholar · 4.0 GPA
B.S. · Computer Science
University of Narowal · Pakistan
Beyond the paper
Amazon Web Services
AI/ML Software Development Engineer Intern · Palo Alto, California
Experience building in a production ML engineering environment, alongside my academic work.
Teras & Keras
Multi-backend deep learning for tabular data, random-sampling APIs, and consistent ML tooling across frameworks.
Interested in research, collaboration, or applied ML work? Feel free to reach out.