Md Ashikur Rahman is a Lead AI Engineer at The KOW Company, specializing in multimodal AI, vision-language systems, generative AI, and production computer vision.

Research interests: trustworthy multimodal machine learning; vision-language models; AI safety and robustness.

He leads 15+ engineers and researchers across applied research, product development, and enterprise delivery, and has built and scaled production AI systems supporting 200+ brands, including computer-vision platforms that have processed 4.5M+ images globally.

Recent Highlights

  • ICDAR 2026 oral paper on diagram understanding with LogicBench-1K (last and corresponding author).
  • Three first-author manuscripts under review on conformal risk control for LLM tool calls, detector-based grounding metrics in video QA, and math-encoded jailbreaks.
  • The Fitting Room: cross-brand virtual try-on platform covering 170+ brands.
  • CogniX: early-stage R&D for proprietary multimodal image generation and editing.

Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering, American International University-Bangladesh, 2011-2015. CGPA 3.87/4.00 (WES equivalent 3.94/4.00); magna cum laude; top 3%; Merit Scholarship and Tuition Fee Waiver.

Publications

Stroke-Level Connectivity Verification: Grounding Vision-Language Models Against Topology Hallucination in Diagram Understanding · ICDAR 2026 · Oral · Last and corresponding author · LogicBench-1K

Beyond Aggregate Risk: Role-Stratified Conformal Risk Control for LLM Tool Calls · Manuscript under review, 2026 · First author

When Detector-Based Grounding Metrics Measure Vocabulary: A Cautionary Audit of Entity Claims in Video-QA Reasoning Traces · Manuscript under review, 2026 · First author

Math-Encoded Jailbreaks Across Provider-Matched Models and Inference-Time Reasoning Configurations · Manuscript under review, 2026 · First author

Automated Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy Using Deep Residual Learning · International Journal of Computer Applications, 2020

Full publication list on Google Scholar →

Selected Projects

Retouched.ai Object Detection and Segmentation
Lead AI Engineer Production
  • Developed production salient-object segmentation for background removal; improved segmentation quality by 17% on internal benchmarks, reduced processing time by 30%, supported uploads up to 257 MB, and achieved a 2.27-second average processing time across standard production workloads.
  • Scaled Retouched.ai to process 4.5M+ images globally for hundreds of customers using PyTorch, U²-Net-inspired salient-object segmentation, FastAPI, and Google Cloud Platform.
Omnimage.ai AI Image and Video Generation
Lead AI Engineer Production
  • Co-designed and launched production image- and video-generation APIs used across 200+ brands for creative and product-image workflows.
  • Built workflows for reference-image conditioning, asynchronous processing, prompt classification, intent routing, and automated model selection.
The Fitting Room Cross-Brand Virtual Try-On Platform
Lead AI Engineer In Development
  • Conceived and co-led a unified cross-brand virtual try-on platform covering 170+ brands.
  • Architected a Dockerized FastAPI/Nginx backend using SQL Server, Google Cloud Storage, Redis, recommendation services, and 2D virtual try-on pipelines.
Enterprise AI Catalog Audit and Image Quality Assurance Platform Catalog, Image, and Content Quality Audit
Lead AI Engineer In Development
  • Lead development of an AI catalog-audit and image quality assurance platform for a major US retail client.
  • Automate image QA, catalog validation, metadata checks, and content-health monitoring across DAM and CMS workflows using computer vision, NLP, PyTorch, and FastAPI.
CogniX Proprietary Multimodal Image Generation and Editing
Lead AI Engineer Active R&D
  • Leading early-stage R&D for a proprietary multimodal image-generation and editing system for product-visualization workflows.
  • Researching and prototyping multi-reference fusion and prompt-guided image-editing workflows for garment replacement, scene composition, product visualization, and style transfer using PyTorch, Diffusers, ComfyUI, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA).

Experience

The KOW Company Dhaka, Bangladesh
Lead AI Engineer Current Jan 2023 - Present
  • Lead a multidisciplinary team of 15+ ML engineers, software engineers, and researchers across architecture, planning, code review, and delivery; maintain 90-95% on-time delivery across AI engineering projects.
  • Oversee development of production AI systems across virtual try-on, generative media, 3D reconstruction, catalog audit, and audio QA.
  • Direct applied research on AI hallucination, prompt safety, visual grounding, and video understanding; last and corresponding author on an ICDAR 2026 oral paper.
  • Mentor and supervise four researchers on literature review, research planning, experimental design, reproducible implementation, result analysis, and academic writing.
  • Develop and scale production segmentation and image-processing systems, including Retouched.ai; publish reproducible research code, datasets, and model artifacts on GitHub and Hugging Face.
Senior Machine Learning Engineer Jul 2021 - Dec 2022
  • Improved object detection and segmentation performance by 20-35% across internal evaluation benchmarks; the resulting models were later deployed through Retouched.ai.
  • Led 6+ client ML engagements from business requirements to technical delivery; built offline evaluation pipelines and production A/B testing workflows to validate model quality, inference performance, and production outcomes.
Machine Learning Engineer Jul 2020 - Jun 2021
  • Built deep learning models for production object recognition, image segmentation, and background-removal workflows; developed scalable preprocessing, training, and A/B testing pipelines.
Smart Technologies (BD) Ltd Dhaka, Bangladesh
Senior Software Engineer Sep 2016 - Dec 2019
  • Led .NET and SQL Server supply-chain systems on a 4 TB database, reducing report generation from 20 minutes to 40-54 seconds.
  • Achieved 70-75% process automation and 99.9% synchronization success for offline-capable enterprise workflows.
Proggasoft Dhaka, Bangladesh
Software Engineer Mar 2015 - Aug 2016
  • Developed ASP.NET MVC features, backend services, and database integrations for DevSkill.com.

Technical Skills

Multimodal and Vision-Language AI
Python · PyTorch · Vision-Language Models · Visual Grounding · Hallucination Evaluation · Multimodal Learning
Generative AI and LLMs
Diffusion Models · Large Language Models (Llama, Qwen) · Prompt Safety · Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (LoRA, QLoRA) · Prompt-Guided Image Editing
Computer Vision
Object Detection · Segmentation · Pose Estimation · Image Quality Assurance
3D Vision
Structure from Motion · Multi-View Stereo · COLMAP · Open3D · Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) · 3D Gaussian Splatting
Production ML and MLOps
Model Serving · Production Deployment · Offline Evaluation · Production A/B Testing · Model Evaluation · Dataset Design
Backend and Cloud
FastAPI · Docker · Nginx · Redis · Google Cloud Platform · Google Cloud Storage · SQL Server

Honors and Awards

  • Champion, BASIS National ICT Awards, 2020 (Retouched.ai)
  • Finalist, Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards, 2021
  • Artificial Intelligence in Advertising, invited workshop speaker, Daffodil International University
  • Magna Cum Laude; Top 3%; Merit Scholarship and Tuition Fee Waiver, AIUB

Contact

Open to research collaboration, speaking invitations, and professional inquiries in multimodal AI, vision-language models, and applied machine learning.