Shahariar Rabby

Research Scientist · PhD, Computer Science

University of Alabama at Birmingham — CLAIR & KDDM Lab

Portrait of Shahariar Rabby
50
Peer-reviewed
16
First-author
1,000+
Citations
17
h-index
25
i10-index
13
Mentees
Research Vision

My research asks whether vision systems can recognize missing branches, broken connections, and false junctions from image evidence and their own predictions, without reference masks at inference time. I study when targeted correction improves structural reliability over uniform refinement, alongside supporting questions about multimodal evidence and efficient inference.

Research Program

Thin-Structure Segmentation · Minority-Class Segmentation · Deployable AI (MLOps)

My work sits at the intersection of representation learning for thin, elongated, and minority-class structures and systems that are deployed and validated in the field — clinical and industrial, not just benchmarked.

The current thread began with lightweight, multicenter COPD detection and now focuses on 3D pulmonary fissure segmentation and a fissure-integrity score for studying completeness and connectivity across the lung.

Clinical biomarkersConnect fissure integrity with longitudinal CT and COPD outcomes.
Smaller structuresGeneralize topology-preserving methods to finer medical-imaging targets.
Cross-domain systemsExtend validated methods from clinical imaging to structural safety.
Read the full five-year research plan

As a Research Scientist at UAB, this line is active through 3D pulmonary fissure segmentation and an algorithmic fissure-integrity score. The program extends from it in three directions:

  1. Toward a clinical biomarker. Pair the integrity score with longitudinal CT to study emphysema progression near incomplete or damaged fissures, and correlate missing surface, gaps, fragmentation, and completeness with clinical variables including FEV1, GOLD severity, emphysema burden, and air trapping.
  2. To smaller structures. Generalize thin-structure methods to finer medical-imaging targets, including mucus plugs in the airways, where topology and connectivity preservation remain central.
  3. Across domains. Extend topology-preserving methods demonstrated on infrastructure cracks toward road and structural safety in collaboration with civil engineers.

Foundations. Earlier work in low-resource language processing and document understanding — including Bangla OCR, handwriting, and sign-language datasets — developed the dataset-design and rare-class modeling skills that support this program.

Appointments & Experience

Academic appointments, teaching, and selected industry leadership

Academic & Research Appointments

Research Scientist

University of Alabama at Birmingham · Jun 2026 – Present
Center for Lung Analytics & Imaging Research (CLAIR) and Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining Lab. Leading deployable medical-imaging AI, including multicenter COPD detection, pulmonary fissure segmentation, and fissure-integrity analysis under NIH/NHLBI R01 HL151421.

Graduate Research Assistant

University of Alabama at Birmingham · Aug 2021 – May 2026
CLAIR and Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining Lab. Led architecture design and multicenter validation for COPDxNet; independently designed STRIPE; developed topology-preserving thin-structure methods, benchmark datasets, and scalable inference infrastructure.

Teaching & Mentoring

Course Instructor, AIM 646: LLM Development in Medicine

UAB Heersink School of Medicine · Fall 2026 · About 30 graduate students
A three-credit course meeting about three hours weekly, in person and online. Topics include language-model fundamentals, programming, RAG and advanced retrieval, tool calling, multimodal models, and agentic workflows, taught through runnable examples and fixed test cases. I arranged a separate programming-support session and teach students to explain, test, and debug AI-generated code; patient information must not be entered into unapproved tools.

Lecturer (Part-Time), Daffodil International University

Jan 2019 – Dec 2020 · 50+ students/semester
Taught CSE 412 Artificial Intelligence and CSE 413L AI Lab using Python/PyTorch implementations, evaluation, debugging, and applied AI projects.

Mentored 13 undergraduate researchers

To First-Author Peer-Reviewed Publications
Multiple mentees later entered Ph.D. programs at U.S. institutions. Research Supervisor, DIU NLP & ML Lab (2019–2021); current International Advisor to the lab.

Courses prepared to teach

Undergraduate & Graduate
Courses: Artificial Intelligence · Machine Learning · Computer Vision · Deep Learning · Applied Data Science · Generative AI · Foundational undergraduate CS.
Proposed electives: Trustworthy and Deployable AI Systems · LLM and Multimodal AI in Medicine.

Workshop & special-track organizer

WVLL 2024 · WVLL 2026 · FLAIRS-40 2027
Workshop Organizer, WVLL at IEEE/CVF WACV 2024; Lead Organizer, WVLL 2026 (in progress); Organizer (upcoming), Embodied AI Agents, Robotics, and IoT Special Track at FLAIRS-40 (2027).

Industry Experience

Senior ML Engineer / Technical Lead

Apurba Technologies · Part-Time · Nov 2025 – Present · Remote
Kagoj.ai (Bangladesh Government national AI platform): fine-tuned a Qwen2.5 VLM via LoRA with FP8 quantization and Flash Attention 2; deployed via vLLM on a single L40S GPU serving 30K daily active users at 1K–2K peak RPS (p50=84ms, p95=91ms). Led a 13-engineer team re-architecting the platform into event-driven microservices (Kafka). Architected a HIPAA-compliant RAG pipeline with PHI handling for automated medical bill auditing at Dorsal.fyi (acquired by Promise, Feb 2026).

Machine Learning Engineer → Team Lead

Apurba Technologies · Oct 2019 – Aug 2021
Built the production ML pipeline for Bangladesh's national Bangla document digitization platform. Optimized Triton and ONNX deployment for an 18.6× inference speedup and 10× memory reduction; grew the team from 3 to 10+ engineers and scaled services to 10K+ daily requests at 99.5% uptime.

Artificial Intelligence Engineer (Contract)

Genex Digital · Apr 2019 – Oct 2019
Developed multilingual Bangla, English, and Banglish conversational AI systems for telecom and banking applications.

Research Areas

Structural Reliability in Vision

Thin Structures & Connectivity
Study how vision systems detect missing branches, broken connections, and false junctions when overlap scores alone do not capture structural errors.

Medical Imaging & Clinical Vision

Pulmonary Fissures · COPD
CT-based COPD detection and 3D pulmonary-fissure segmentation, with continuity and incompleteness analysis pursued with imaging collaborators.

Multimodal, Generative & Document AI

LLMs, VLMs & OCR
Evaluate when OCR, image-text, or retrieved evidence adds reliable information and when it repeats or introduces an error.

Adaptive & Efficient Inference

Matched Quality · Compute-Aware Evaluation
Compare targeted and uniform refinement under matched total computational costs; study when more expensive inference is worthwhile.

Selected Publications

50 peer-reviewed publications, including 16 first-author papers. Full record on Google Scholar →

Medical Imaging & Respiratory AI

2024

Rabby, Saha, Abujar, Rahman. One Model Multiple Insights: CNNs for Medical Image Classification

IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 2024 · First author

2025

Saha, Chaudhary, Rabby, Sthanam, Bodduluri, Nakhmani, Zhang, Bhatt. Machine Learning Based Detection of True Ventilatory Restriction

Respiratory Medicine (Elsevier), 2025

Thin-Structure & Topology Segmentation

2026

Rabby, Zhang, Nakhmani, Bodduluri, Bhatt. STRIPE: Efficient Directional Feature Encoding for Ultra-Thin Pulmonary Fissure Segmentation Accepted

IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), 2026 · First author

A directional encoder–decoder for pulmonary fissure segmentation. It achieved Dice 0.873 and median HD95 0.72 mm on 50 COPDGene CT scans evaluated with subject-level five-fold cross-validation; the model has approximately 5.1 million parameters. Accepted at IEEE BIBM 2026; proceedings forthcoming.

2025

Rabby, Zhang. dCrack: Enhancing Fine-Grained Crack Segmentation with Edge-Guided Attention ✦ dCrack61K

IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI), 2025 · First author

Edge-Guided Attention for minority-class crack segmentation, plus the dCrack61K benchmark (61,943 images, 36 sources, 2,000+ corrected annotations). Cross-domain transfer: F1 0.8251 on CHASE_DB1 retinal vessels without vessel-specific training.

bibtex
@inproceedings{rabby2025dcrack,
  title     = {dCrack: Enhancing Fine-Grained Crack Segmentation with Edge-Guided Attention},
  author    = {Rabby, Shahariar and Zhang, Chengcui},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI)},
  year      = {2025}
}

Document AI, OCR & Low-Resource Language

2026

Islam, Hasan, Ovi, Rabby, Rahman. BornoDrishti: Leveraging Vision Encoders and Domain-Adaptive Learning for Bangla OCR on Diverse Documents Published

EACL Industry Track, pp. 278–286, 2026

2024

Rabby, Ali, Islam, Abujar, Rahman. Enhancement of Bengali OCR by Specialized Models and Advanced Techniques for Diverse Document Types

IEEE/CVF WACV Workshops, 2024 · First author

2021

Rabby, Islam, Islam, Hasan, Rahman. Towards Building a Robust Large-Scale Bangla Text Recognition Solution Using a Unique Multiple-Domain Character-Based Document Recognition Approach

IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 2021 · First author

Datasets & Benchmarks

2018

Rabby, Haque, Islam, Abujar, Hossain. Ekush: A Multipurpose & Multitype Comprehensive Database for Bangla Handwritten Characters ✦ Best Paper

RTIP2R, Springer, 2018 · First author

A large-scale Bangla handwritten character dataset: 673K instances across 242 classes. A common baseline dataset for Bangla OCR research.

Manuscripts Under Review

2025

Rabby, Chaudhary, Saha, Sthanam, Nakhmani, Zhang, et al. Light Convolutional Neural Network to Detect Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDxNet): A Multicenter Model Development and External Validation Study Under review

medRxiv preprint · under review at The Lancet Digital Health · First & corresponding author

A 10.6M-parameter 3D CNN evaluated on 13,043 COPDGene CT scans from 21 centers using participant-level train/test separation. AUC was 0.92 for standard-dose and 0.88 for low-dose scans; external AUC was 0.92 on SPIROMICS and 0.82 on NLST.

2026

Rabby, Zhang. THREAD: Efficient Directional Context and Structural Refinement for Crack Segmentation Under review

Manuscript under review · First author

Across four benchmarks, mean [email protected] was 0.8250. On Crack500, [email protected] was 0.7481 and clDice was 0.8202. The model has 5.634M parameters and 9.326 GFLOPs (48.6% below SCSegamba); inference reached 75.35 FPS on NVIDIA A6000 and 4.711 FPS at 256×256 or 0.970 FPS at 512×512 on Raspberry Pi 5.

Complete Record

50 accepted or published peer-reviewed papers (including 16 first-author papers), plus 3 manuscripts/preprints and 1 ATS conference abstract. Google Scholar ↗

Browse the complete publication record by year
3 2026
  • Islam, Hasan, Ovi, Rabby, Rahman. BornoDrishti: Leveraging Vision Encoders and Domain-Adaptive Learning for Bangla OCR on Diverse Documents. EACL Industry Track, pp. 278–286, 2026.
  • Rabby, Zhang, Nakhmani, Bodduluri, Bhatt. STRIPE: Efficient Directional Feature Encoding for Ultra-Thin Pulmonary Fissure Segmentation. Accepted at IEEE BIBM 2026 (proceedings forthcoming). First author.
  • Rabby, Zhang. THREAD: Efficient Directional Context and Structural Refinement for Crack Segmentation. Manuscript under review, 2026. First author.
4 2025
  • Saha, Chaudhary, Rabby, Bodduluri, Nakhmani, Zhang, Bhatt. Machine Learning Based Detection of True Ventilatory Restriction. Respiratory Medicine (Elsevier).
  • Hasan, Islam, Rabby, Rahman. Beyond Characters: Position-Aware Metric and a Lightweight LLM for Low-Resource Bangla Punctuation Restoration. IEEE Big Data.
  • Rabby, Zhang. dCrack: Enhancing Fine-Grained Crack Segmentation with Edge-Guided Attention. IEEE IRI. First author.
  • Rabby, Chaudhary, Saha, Sthanam, Nakhmani, Zhang, et al. Light Convolutional Neural Network to Detect Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDxNet): A Multicenter Model Development and External Validation Study. medRxiv preprint; under review at The Lancet Digital Health. 13,043 COPDGene CT scans from 21 centers; participant-level train/test split; AUC 0.92 standard-dose, 0.88 low-dose, 0.92 SPIROMICS, and 0.82 NLST. First & corresponding author.
4 2024
  • Akanda, Ahmed, Rabby, Rahman. Optimum Deep Learning Method for Document Layout Analysis in Low Resource Languages. ACM Southeast.
  • Rabby, Saha, Abujar, Rahman. One Model Multiple Insights: CNNs for Medical Image Classification. IEEE Big Data, pp. 3935–3941. 2024.
  • Rabby, Ali, Islam, Abujar, Rahman. Enhancement of Bengali OCR by Specialized Models and Advanced Techniques. IEEE/CVF WACV Workshops. First author.
  • Rabby, Saha, Nakhmani, Reinhardt, Zhang, Bhatt, Bodduluri. COPDxNet: An End-to-End Deep Neural Network for COPD Detection. ATS International Conference (abstract).
5 2023
  • Zhao, Zhang, Saxena, Wallach, Rabby. Ballot Tabulation Using Deep Learning. IEEE IRI (NSF #2154589).
  • Ali, Rabby, Islam, Mahamud, Hasan, Rahman. Gold Standard Bangla OCR Dataset: Data Preprocessing and Annotation. EMNLP Industry Track. Co-first author.
  • Rabby, Ali, Islam, Rahman. Versatile Bengali OCR: Document Analysis Technique for Varied Document Styles and Content. IEEE Big Data, pp. 1965–1969. 2023.
  • Mollah, Mohammed, Wasek, Rabby, Rahman, Mohammed. Automated Mapping of Healthcare Concepts to a Standardized Healthcare Taxonomy. Tiny Papers @ ICLR.
  • Rabby, Zhang. BeyondPixels: A Comprehensive Review of the Evolution of Neural Radiance Fields. arXiv preprint.
1 2022
  • Das, Rabby, Kowsar, Rahman. A Deep Learning-based Unified Solution for Character Recognition. ICPR.
8 2021
  • Islam, Das, Rabby, Hasan, Rahman. Towards Building a Bangla Text Recognition Solution with a Multi-Headed CNN. IEEE Big Data.
  • Rabby, Islam, Islam, Hasan, Rahman. Towards Building a Robust Large-Scale Bangla Text Recognition Solution Using a Unique Multiple-Domain Character-Based Document Recognition Approach. IEEE ICMLA, pp. 1393–1399. 2021.
  • Rahman, Rahman, Rabby, et al. Modeling Influenza with a Forest Deep Neural Network Utilizing a Virtualized Clinical Semantic Network. IEEE Big Data, pp. 4753–4760. 2021.
  • Rahman, Rahman, Rabby, et al. Disease Modeling with a Forest Deep Neural Network Utilizing NLP and a Virtualized Clinical Semantic Network. IEEE ICTAI.
  • Islam, Khushbu, Rabby, Bhuiyan. A Study on Dengue Fever in Bangladesh. IEEE ICICCS.
  • Ferdous, Karmaker, Rabby, Hossain. MatriVasha: A Multipurpose Comprehensive Database for Bangla Handwritten Compound Characters. IEMIS, Springer.
  • Sany, Keya, Khushbu, Rabby, Masum. An Opinion Mining of Text in COVID-19 Issues. Springer.
  • Islam, Rabby, Hasan, Nahar, Rahman. A Novel Bangla Font Recognition Approach Using Deep Learning. IEMIS, Springer.
7 2020
  • Rabby, Islam, Hasan, Nahar, Rahman. Language and Printing Style Detection from Bilingual Scanned Documents. IEEE Big Data. First author.
  • Rabby, Islam, Hasan, Nahar, Rahman. Borno: Bangla Handwritten Character Recognition Using a Multiclass CNN. FTC, Springer. First author.
  • Rabby, Islam, Rahman. Establishing a Formal Benchmarking Process for Sentiment Analysis for Bangla. FTC, Springer. First author.
  • Rabby, Islam, Hasan, Nahar, Rahman. Language Detection using Convolutional Neural Network. IEEE ICCCNT. First author.
  • Roy, Hasan, Fuhad, Mohammed, Rabby, Hasan, Nahar, Rahman. Bangla POS Tagging Using Contextual Embeddings and Oversampling. FTC, Springer.
  • Jamal, Bappy, Rabby. Brazilian Forest Fire Analysis: An Unsupervised Approach. Springer.
  • Jamal, Bappy, Pervin, Rabby. Weather Status Prediction of Dhaka City Using Machine Learning. Springer.
10 2019
  • Islam, Rahman, Rabby. Sankhya: An Unbiased Benchmark for Bangla Handwritten Digits Recognition. IEEE Big Data.
  • Hasan, Rabby, Islam, Hossain. Machine Learning Algorithm for Student's Performance Prediction. IEEE ICCCNT.
  • Rabby, Mamata, Laboni, Abujar, Hossain. Machine Learning Applied to Kidney Disease Prediction. IEEE ICCCNT. First author.
  • Islam, Rabby, Arfin, Hossain. PataNET: CNN to Identify Plant from Leaf Images. IEEE ICCCNT.
  • Sheikh, Mim, Reza, Rabby, Hossain. Detection of Maize and Peach Leaf Diseases Using Image Processing. IEEE ICCCNT.
  • Masum, Abujar, Talukder, Rabby, Hossain. Abstractive Text Summarization with Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs. IEEE ICCCNT.
  • Khan, Islam, Ullah, Rabby. A Machine Learning Approach to Recognize Junk Food. IEEE ICCCNT.
  • Arif, Sany, Nahin, Rabby. Product Demand Forecasting with Machine Learning. IEEE SMART.
  • Al Mamun, Kadir, Rabby, Al Azmi. Bangla Music Genre Classification Using Neural Network. IEEE SMART.
  • Abdullha, Habib, Masum, Rabby. Countries Condition of Forestation and Trees Percentage. IEEE SMART.
12 2018
  • Rabby, Haque, Islam, Abujar, Hossain. Ekush: A Multipurpose & Multitype Comprehensive Database for Bangla Handwritten Characters. RTIP2R, Springer. First author · Best Paper Award.
  • Islam, Khushbu, Rabby, Hossain. Ishara-Lipi: The First Complete Multipurpose Dataset for Bangla Sign Language. ICBSLP, IEEE.
  • Islam, Mousumi, Jessan, Rabby, Abujar, Hossain. Ishara-Bochon: Bangla Sign Language Isolated Digits. RTIP2R, Springer.
  • Haque, Rabby, Laboni, Neehal, Hossain. ExNET: Deep Neural Network for Exercise Pose Detection. RTIP2R, Springer.
  • Haque, Rabby, Islam, Hossain. ShonkhaNet: Dynamic Routing for Bangla Handwritten Digit Recognition. RTIP2R, Springer.
  • Haque, Shahinoor, Rabby, Abujar, Hossain. OnkoGan: Bangla Handwritten Digit Generation with DCGAN. RTIP2R, Springer.
  • Islam, Mousumi, Rabby, Hossain. Arrowhead Detection of Bangla Sign Language with CNN. RTIP2R, Springer.
  • Rabby, Abujar, Haque, Hossain. Bangla Handwritten Digit Recognition Using CNN. IEMIS, Springer. First author.
  • Rabby, Haque, Abujar, Hossain. EkushNet: CNN for Bangla Handwritten Recognition. Procedia CS, Elsevier. First author.
  • Islam, Mousumi, Rabby, Hossain, Abujar. Recognize Bangla Sign Language Digits Using CNN. Procedia CS, Elsevier.
  • Rabby, Haque, Islam, Abujar, Hossain. BornoNet: Bangla Handwritten Characters Recognition. Procedia CS, Elsevier. First author.
  • Rabby, Haque, Shahinoor, Abujar, Hossain. A Universal Way to Collect and Process Handwritten Data. Procedia CS, Elsevier. First author.

Grants & Funded Research

NIH/NHLBI R01 HL151421

2022–Present
"Structural Determinants of Disease Progression in COPD" — PIs: Surya Bhatt, MD & Arie Nakhmani, PhD. Research Scientist (Jun 2026–Present); Graduate Research Assistant (2022–May 2026). Lead developer on COPDxNet and STRIPE, contributing multicenter CT validation, pulmonary fissure analysis, and scalable 3D imaging AI.

NSF #2154589 · $1.2M collaborative award

UAB sub-award $397,302 · 2022–2027
"Bubble Aid: Assistive AI to Improve the Robustness and Security of Reading Hand-Marked Ballots" — PI: Chengcui Zhang, PhD. Graduate Research Assistant (Year 1); developed image registration and voting-target localization for robust ballot tabulation and co-authored the IEEE IRI 2023 publication.

Academic Service

33+ verified peer reviews

Web of Science / Publons
Journals: IEEE TDSC (9), IJMDEM (6), IEEE TMM (3). Conferences: ACM Multimedia (6), WACV (4), ICMLA (3), AAAI (1), CVPR (1).

Leadership & organization

Workshops & Service
International Advisor, DIU NLP & ML Lab; previously Research Supervisor (2019–2021). Workshop Organizer, WVLL @ IEEE/CVF WACV 2024; Lead Organizer, WVLL 2026 (in progress); Organizer (upcoming), Embodied AI Agents, Robotics, and IoT Special Track at FLAIRS-40 (2027). Webmaster, UAB Graduate Student Government (2024–2025).

Fellowships & Awards

CS Outstanding PhD Student AwardUAB · 2026 · Departmental highest distinction
Best Paper — "Ekush"RTIP2R · 2018
Barrett R. & Oceana A. Bryant Endowed AwardUAB · 2022, 2024
Best PaperIEMIS · 2018
Blazer FellowshipUAB · 2021–2022
CVPR Travel Grant2022
UAB Graduate Dean's Scholarship2022
3-Minute Research Pitch — 1st Runner UpSBCL · 2022
Best Student Research AwardDIU · 2018 & 2019
IBM Centre of Excellence MVP2020–2021

Research Artifacts & Datasets

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Aug 2021 – Apr 2026

Dissertation: Precise Segmentation of Thin, Elongated, and Underrepresented Structures. Advisor: Dr. Chengcui Zhang. CS Outstanding PhD Student Award, 2026.

M.S. in Computer Science
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Aug 2021 – Apr 2023

Coursework: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Science, Cloud Computing, Algorithms.

B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering
Daffodil International University
Jan 2015 – Dec 2018

Thesis: Ekush: Bangla Handwritten Character Data Repository for NLP Research.

Get in touch
for positions and collaboration.

Medical imaging AI, document understanding, or deployable ML.