Publications and Projects

A collection of my research contributions and real-world engineering work, from published papers to hands-on systems and open-source projects.

Publications

My research spanning federated learning, encryption, recommender systems, distributed systems, and much more.

HERL: Tiered Federated Learning with Adaptive Homomorphic Encryption using Reinforcement Learning

Jiaxang Tang, Zeshan Fayyaz, Mohammad A Salahuddin, Raouf Boutaba, Zhi-Li Zhang, Ali Anwar

2024 β€” arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.07631

We propose HERL, a reinforcement learning-based approach to dynamically optimize homomorphic encryption parameters across client tiers in federated learning. HERL improves utility by 17%, reduces convergence time by up to 24%, and increases efficiency by up to 30% while maintaining security.

Read it here β†’
It was also my MMath thesis β†’

Deep Unfolding for Iterative Stripe Noise Removal

Zeshan Fayyaz, Daniel Platnick, Hannan Fayyaz, Nariman Farsad

2022 β€” International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)

We propose a novel iterative deep unfolding algorithm to remove fixed-pattern stripe noise from infrared images. By leveraging neighboring column correlations, our method preserves fine details and achieves real-time performance.

Read it here β†’

Recommendation Systems: Algorithms, Challenges, Metrics, and Business Opportunities

Zeshan Fayyaz, Mahsa Ebrahimian, Dina Nawara, Ahmed Ibrahim, Rasha Kashef

2020 β€” Applied Sciences, MDPI

A comprehensive overview of recommendation system types, methodologies, limitations, and industry applications. This work has been cited ~500 times and remains one of the most downloaded in its domain, with ~30,000 downloads.

Read it here β†’

BOLT: Towards a Scalable Docker Registry via Hyperconvergence

Michael Littley, Ali Anwar, Hannan Fayyaz, Zeshan Fayyaz, Vasily Tarasov, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitrios Skourtis, Mohamed Mohamed, Heiko Ludwig, Yue Cheng, Ali R Butt

2019 β€” IEEE CLOUD

We present BOLT, a hyperconverged design for Docker registries that improves scalability, caching efficiency, and deployment simplicity by consolidating registry components into a tightly connected cluster.

Read it here β†’

Towards Taming the Resource and Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

Zheng Chai, Hannan Fayyaz, Zeshan Fayyaz, Ali Anwar, Yi Zhou, Nathalie Baracaldo, Heiko Ludwig, Yue Cheng

2019 β€” USENIX OpML

We investigate techniques to mitigate heterogeneity challenges in federated learning across diverse client devices and datasets, enabling more performant and equitable collaborative model training.

Read it here β†’

Projects

My practical engineering work, research prototypes, and open-source contributions demonstrating applied problem solving in AI, distributed systems, and software development.

LaTeX-Written Scientific Paper Feature Extraction

Tech: Python, regex-based LaTeX parsing, Pandas, CLI, Ollama, FAISS, SentenceTransformers, MCP, RAG

A Python-based tool that parses LaTeX research papers and automatically extracts metadata such as publication year, equations, references, and section structure for downstream analytics and knowledge graph construction.

View on GitHub β†’

LLM + RAG + MCP Based Knowledge Assistant for Support Team

Tech: FastAPI, Python, SentenceTransformers, FAISS, MCP, RAG pipeline, Ollama, Docker

A retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system that uses FastAPI, SentenceTransformers, and FAISS to ingest documentation and resolve support tickets automatically. Designed for scalability and local LLM deployment with Ollama.

View on GitHub β†’

Machine Learning-Driven Job Recommender System

Tech: Python, Django REST, React, scikit-learn, Pandas, TF-IDF & LDA, PostgreSQL

A full-stack recommendation engine that takes a user’s resume and returns the top five most relevant job listings using LDA topic modelling, TF-IDF similarity metrics, and a React + Django web app. The system was trained on a corpus of 20,000 job postings and designed to combat information overload in job searches.

Read the documentation here β†’

Deep Unfolding for Iterative Stripe Noise Removal

Tech: PyTorch (BiGRUs and CNNs), NumPy, OpenCV, CUDA

An iterative deep learning framework that progressively removes fixed-pattern stripe noise from infrared images while preserving fine detail, leveraging unfolding principles to reduce search space and improve convergence.

View on GitHub β†’

JupyterLab-Git Plugin Contributions

Tech: TypeScript, JupyterLab Extension API, Node.js, Git (credential/UI flow)

Contributed to the open-source JupyterLab-Git plugin by improving user credential caching, significantly enhancing user experience during remote repository operations.