Shahariar Rabby

Research Scientist · PhD, Computer Science

University of Alabama at Birmingham — CLAIR & KDDM Lab

Portrait of Shahariar Rabby
45
Peer-reviewed
14
First-author
1,000+
Citations
17
h-index
25
i10-index
13
Mentees
Research Vision

My research develops constraint-driven machine learning methods that bridge algorithmic innovation and deployable systems. I focus on thin-structure and minority-class segmentation in medical imaging and structural monitoring, with emphasis on multi-institutional validation, topology and connectivity preservation, and real-world feasibility under memory and latency budgets.

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

Credentialed Course Instructor – Medicine

UAB Heersink School of Medicine · Fall 2026
Teaching AIM 646: LLM Development in Medicine (3-credit graduate course). Topics: tokenization, text classification, sentiment analysis, prompt-based applications, fine-tuning for domain-specific healthcare use cases, and responsible AI/ethics/privacy/regulatory. In-person + online sections.

Lecturer (Part-Time), Daffodil International University

Jan 2019 – Dec 2020 · 50+ students/semester
Taught CSE 412 (Artificial Intelligence) and CSE 413L (AI Lab). Shifted instruction toward project-based learning with Python/PyTorch, debugging through learning curves, and end-to-end AI prototypes.

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

Graduate & Undergraduate
Introduction to AI · Machine Learning · Deep Learning · Computer Vision · Medical Image Analysis · Generative AI/LLMs · Data Science · Deployable AI Systems · Efficient/Scalable ML.

Workshop organizer

WVLL @ WACV 2024 & WVLL 2026
Workshop Organizer, Vision-Based Understanding for Low-Resource Languages at IEEE/CVF WACV 2024; Lead Organizer, WVLL 2026 at the University of North Texas.

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

Medical Imaging & Clinical AI

Multicenter Validation
3D CT analysis, pulmonary fissure segmentation, COPD detection, quantitative imaging biomarkers, and clinically grounded external validation.

Efficient & Trustworthy Visual AI

Thin & Minority-Class Structures
Topology and connectivity preservation, long-tail learning, calibration, efficient inference, and robust cross-domain evaluation.

Multimodal, Generative & Document AI

LLMs, VLMs & OCR
Domain-adaptive vision-language systems, RAG, low-resource document understanding, OCR, and responsible healthcare applications.

Deployable ML Systems & Edge AI

Inference & MLOps
GPU and edge inference, latency- and memory-aware deployment, scalable serving, and privacy-aware clinical and enterprise pipelines.

Selected Publications

45 peer-reviewed publications, including 14 first-author papers. Full record on Google Scholar →

Medical Imaging & Respiratory AI

2025

Rabby, Chaudhary, Saha, Nakhmani, Zhang, Barr, Reinhardt, Bhatt, Bodduluri. Light Convolutional Neural Network for Detecting COPD: A Multicenter Model Development and External Validation

medRxiv, 2025 · under review at The Lancet Digital Health · First & corresponding author

A lightweight 3D CNN (10.6M parameters) for population-scale COPD detection from inspiratory chest CT. Trained on COPDGene (21 centers, 13K+ CT scans); AUC 0.92 internally, with external validation on SPIROMICS (AUC 0.92) and NLST (AUC 0.82).

bibtex
@article{rabby2025copd,
  title   = {Light Convolutional Neural Network for Detecting Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Multicenter Model Development and External Validation},
  author  = {Rabby, Shahariar and Chaudhary and Saha and Nakhmani and Zhang, Chengcui and Barr and Reinhardt and Bhatt and Bodduluri, Sandeep},
  journal = {medRxiv},
  year    = {2025},
  doi     = {10.1101/2025.07.30.25332459}
}
2026

Rabby, Zhang, Nakhmani, Bodduluri, Bhatt. STRIPE: Directional Feature Extraction for Pulmonary Fissure Segmentation In preparation

Manuscript in preparation · First author

A directional encoder–decoder (AFM + DDA; LCNet-100 encoder; UNet++-like decoder) for pulmonary fissure segmentation. Systematic ablation shows encoder-level directional modeling preserves thin-structure continuity: Dice 0.873, HD95 0.72 mm, 5.15M parameters, evaluated on 50 COPDGene CT scans (5-fold CV).

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. THREAD: Efficient Topology-Preserving Network for Thin Structure Segmentation Under review

Manuscript under review · First author

Topology-preserving architecture with a Directional Attention Bridge, Sobel-initialized Topology-Preserving Gate, and Cascaded Directional Refinement. On Crack500: F1 0.7940, clDice 0.8231, 48.6% fewer FLOPs; 92 FPS on GPU and 29.6 FPS on a Raspberry Pi 5 (~19× faster than SSMs). Cross-domain transfer: Dice 0.866 on pulmonary fissures without retraining.

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

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.

Complete Record

45 peer-reviewed publications, plus manuscripts, preprints, and conference abstracts. 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: Directional Feature Extraction for Pulmonary Fissure Segmentation. Manuscript in preparation. First author.
  • Rabby, Zhang. THREAD: Efficient Topology-Preserving Network for Thin Structure Segmentation. Manuscript under review. 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 COPD (COPDxNet). medRxiv (under review at The Lancet Digital Health). First & corresponding author.
3 2024
  • Akanda, Ahmed, Rabby, Rahman. Optimum Deep Learning Method for Document Layout Analysis in Low Resource Languages. ACM Southeast.
  • 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).
4 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.
  • 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.
6 2021
  • Islam, Das, Rabby, Hasan, Rahman. Towards Building a Bangla Text Recognition Solution with a Multi-Headed CNN. IEEE Big Data.
  • 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, University of North Texas. 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 · 2023
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.