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Agentic AI Engineer · Sports Analytics · Researcher

Ahmad
Firas

Building AI systems for uncertain environments — from UAV autonomy research to enterprise agentic workflows.

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Ahmad Firas
Now
Developer I
First Solar · Jun 2026
Research
LION Lab · CPHS Lab
University of Toledo
Degree
B.S. CS & Engineering
GPA 3.23 · 2026
Focus
Agentic AI · UAV · MLOps
The Story— five chapters, scroll to walk through
Chapter 01 · 2021

Toledo, Ohio.

Where it started: the University of Toledo, Computer Science & Engineering. First job on campus — IT support for students and medical staff, where 100% FERPA and HIPAA compliance mattered more than looking clever. The city keeps showing up in everything that follows.

2021–2026B.S. Computer Science & Engineering
Chapter 02 · 2023–2024

Learning by shipping.

A data governance framework at Park Place Technologies that survived every disaster-recovery test with zero data loss. An Arduino control system for a chemically-powered car that won Most Innovative Car Design worldwide. Different fields, same lesson: ask the right question when you have no home-field advantage.

0data loss across all DR simulations
Chapter 03 · 2025

The research pivot.

LION Lab: graph-based reinforcement learning for drones that navigate worlds they have never seen — 72.8% zero-shot success, 97.3% human-in-the-loop reliability at sub-100ms. A $3,000 USRCAP fellowship, an ACM Computing Surveys paper, and an insurance risk model hitting R² = 0.982 in production-grade MLOps. The year AI stopped being coursework.

72.8%zero-shot UAV deployment via MAML
Chapter 04 · 2026

Enterprise scale.

First Solar — first as a Microsoft Solution Developer building agentic AI in Copilot Studio, then full-time as Developer I on Oracle Cloud: VBCS, OIC, BI Publisher. Enterprise applications where thousands of people depend on the systems working, at a company building the energy transition.

Developer IFirst Solar · Jun 2026
Chapter 05 · Now

Football IQ.

Toledo Athletics: from roster-efficiency models to a 10-stage computer vision pipeline that turns practice film into evidence a coach can verify, correct, and teach from. Every corrected label becomes Toledo-specific training data. Trust is the product.

10-stageCV pipeline · 18+ structured metrics
Capabilities

The stack as a constellation — clusters that orbit each other, stars sized by how often they carry real work.

Languages
PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptC++JavaSQL+5
ML & AI
PyTorchTensorFlowscikit-learnRLMAMLGNNs+9
MLOps & Data
AirflowMLflowPandasNumPyAWSAWS S3+11
Robotics
ROS 2GazeboGazebo FortressArduPilotOpenCVYOLO11+10
Web & Edge
ReactNode.jsExpressFastAPIDjangoCloudflare Workers+6
Databases
PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBSQLitePostGISpgvector+5
Microsoft
Azure AICopilot StudioPower AutomatePower BIM365SharePoint+1
Timeline

Career and education as one continuous line — newest first, scroll into the origin story.

✦ MilestoneNov 2025
Most Innovative Car Design
AIChE Chem-E Car · Worldwide
✦ MilestoneMay 2025
USRCAP Research Fellowship
$3,000 · Graph-Based RL UAV Research
✦ MilestoneMar 2025
Best Use of MongoDB Atlas
RocketHacks 2025 · Deep Truth
Education · where it begins2021 – 2026
University of Toledo
B.S. Computer Science & Engineering
Graduated · GPA 3.23
Machine LearningNeural NetworksDatabasesSoftware Eng.Embedded Systems
Bodies of Work

Each project a different operating condition. Hover a poster for the story; click for the full picture.

Active Build
Flagship · University of Toledo Athletics · Football · Active Build

Toledo Football IQ

Practice film becomes evidence a coach can verify, correct, and teach from — trust is the product. A 10-stage pipeline from drone footage to coach dashboard — every output connects to the exact clip, overlay, confidence score, and correction path.

10
Pipeline stages
18+
Structured metrics
90%+
Field-marking accuracy
YOLOByteTrackRTMPoseFastAPIReactPostgresCloudflare R2MLflow
Read the case study ↗Live URL coming when it ships
WR·0.94TE·0.89
Detection → tracking → labels — rendered from the pipeline's point of view
10 / 10
Research

Published work and ongoing investigations.

ACM Computing Surveys · Under Review · 2025

AI Failure Taxonomy for
Autonomous Systems

A four-pillar taxonomy of AI failures in safety-critical autonomous environments. Synthesizes 37 documented incidents across 127 sources, formalizing how data-environment mismatch, oversight gaps, distributional brittleness, and multi-agent instability compound under operational stress.

4-Pillars AI failure taxonomy
37
AI failures analyzed
127
Sources reviewed
4
Pillars in taxonomy
2025
ACM CSUR submission
01Data-Environment Mismatch

Training distributions that diverge from deployment conditions. The initiating mechanism in 18 of 37 documented failures.

02Oversight-Gap Amplification

Monitoring blind spots that allow small deviations to compound undetected until failure becomes irreversible.

03Distributional Brittleness

Systems that perform on benchmarks but fail at the boundary of their training manifold under novel real-world inputs.

04Multi-Agent Instability

Emergent failure modes from agent interactions producing unsafe equilibria that are absent in single-agent testing.

About

Beyond the résumé — who is actually doing the work.

Chasing the gap between what AI can do in a lab and what it actually does when someone's counting on it.

Computer Science & Engineering graduate from the University of Toledo. My work spans autonomous drone systems, enterprise AI, sports analytics, and data engineering. Not by design, but by instinct: I go where the hardest problems are.

LinkedIn ↗GitHub ↗
Three lenses
Lens 01
Engineer
Lens 01 · Engineer

Systems that hold up when someone is counting on them.

From a PostgreSQL security database with zero data loss across every disaster-recovery test, to Oracle Cloud enterprise applications at First Solar — the through-line is engineering for the moment things go wrong, not just the demo. Human-in-the-loop by design; recovery mechanisms as first-class features.

Track record0 data loss across all DR simulations
02Human-in-the-loop by design

A system someone can't override isn't autonomous — it's unpredictable. The recovery mechanism is part of the design, not an afterthought.

03Deployment from line one

Real edge cases, latency requirements, stakeholders who need to understand the output. That pressure makes the work honest.

Education
University of Toledo
B.S. Computer Science & Engineering
2021 – 2026 · Graduated · GPA 3.23
Machine LearningNeural NetworksDatabasesSoftware Eng.Embedded Systems
Lens 02 · Builder

Eleven projects, each a different operating condition.

A drone that navigates unseen worlds, a city reporting tool in production downtown, an insurance model that watches itself drift, a chemical car that won worldwide. Not by design, but by instinct: going where the hardest problems are — and shipping.

In productionbattingcleanup.appliedlabs.org · downtown Toledo
01Interdisciplinary by instinct

The skill that transfers between fields isn't domain knowledge — it's knowing how to ask the right question when you don't have home-field advantage.

Lens 03 · Thinker

Writing down what the work keeps teaching.

An ACM Computing Surveys taxonomy of how AI actually fails. Field notes on what "agentic" really means in production. Quantum computing certificates earned for curiosity, not the résumé. The questions compound faster than the answers — that is the point.

Thinking in public46 field notes planned · 8 categories
01Interdisciplinary by instinct

The skill that transfers between fields isn't domain knowledge — it's knowing how to ask the right question when you don't have home-field advantage.

02Human-in-the-loop by design

A system someone can't override isn't autonomous — it's unpredictable. The recovery mechanism is part of the design, not an afterthought.

Let's build something real.
— Ahmad
Toledo, OH · est. chapter one
Credentials

Certifications, awards, and the communities behind the work.

Certifications · hover or tap to flip
Oracle · Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Associate
Earned 2026 · flip ↻
What it covers

Foundational knowledge of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) core services — compute, storage, networking, identity and access management, security, pricing, and the OCI architecture model.

OCICloud ComputingIAMNetworkingCloud Security
Q-CTRL Black Opal · Quantum Computing
Introduction
Earned 2026 · flip ↻
What it covers

An introduction to quantum technology and how it works. Covers what quantum computing is, how quantum computers work, whether they'll break the internet, how to build one, and a foundational analogy toolbox.

Quantum ComputingFundamentalsQuantum Hardware
Q-CTRL Black Opal · Quantum Computing
Superposition
Earned 2026 · flip ↻
What it covers

The superposition principle — where it comes from, why it's necessary, and what you can do with it. Covers superposition in waves, in the quantum world, in the abstract, and its role in quantum computing.

Quantum ComputingQubitsSuperpositionQuantum Circuits
Currently learning
⟢ OCI Certified Application Integration Professional — Oracle · Exam 1Z0-1042-26 · ⟢ Microsoft Certified: AI Transformation Leader — Exam prep underway · ⟢ Become an Application Integration Professional — Oracle · OCI Application Integration · ⟢ Drive AI Transformation in Your Organization — Microsoft · Course AB-731T00-A
Awards & Recognition
Professional Affiliations
Field Notes— the editorial desk

Thinking in public — dispatches from the edge of AI, robotics, and real-world systems.

All Notes ↗
Featured · AI & Machine LearningMay 19, 2026 · 12 min read

What agentic AI actually means in production — beyond the buzzword

Agentic AI is not magic autonomy. In production, it is a controlled loop where a model can plan, use tools, observe results, and decide what to do next inside strict operational boundaries.

AIAgentic AIProduction SystemsAI Engineering
Read the essay →
In the darkroom · 49 essays planned
How to build a UAV that navigates without GPS — lessons from real research
Zero-shot deployment explained: how meta-learning lets AI generalize without retraining
Why AI systems fail: a taxonomy of 37 real-world breakdowns every developer should know
SHAP and LIME explained: a practical guide to making ML models interpretable
Signals

Press, recognition, and — as they arrive — words from the people behind the work.

Endorsements from collaborators land here as they arrive.

Technical Insights

Not tutorials — perspective. The mechanisms behind the work, sketched in code, each traced back to the project that taught it.

deepflyer/rewards/path_efficiency.pyillustrative
def path_efficiency_reward(state, action, prev):
r = 0.0
r += 4.0 * state.hoop_progress # pull toward the hoop
r -= 0.8 * state.path_deviation # stay on the racing line
r -= 6.0 * float(state.collision) # raise this → drone gets cautious
r -= 0.05 # time pressure: hesitation costs
if state.hoop_cleared:
r += 25.0 # the moment worth learning
return r
Reward functions encode behavior

Reward functions are not just math — they encode behavior. A student who increases the collision penalty and watches the drone become more conservative has understood something no lecture can teach as directly.

From: DeepFlyer · LION Lab
ml_automation/dags/promote_model.pyillustrative
with DAG("model_promotion") as dag:
drift = detect_drift(baseline, live_window)
retrain = retrain_if(drift.score > THRESHOLD)
evaluate = compare(retrain.model, production.model)
# automation with accountability, not without it
approval = SlackApprovalGate(
to="actuarial-review",
context=[drift.report, evaluate.shap_summary],
)
promote = deploy(evaluate.winner, after=approval)
Move humans to the right point in the loop

The 75% reduction in manual review did not happen because humans were removed. The system moved them to the right point in the loop — intervening only where judgment actually matters: drift, suspicious behavior, rollback, promotion.

From: Homeowner Loss Prediction · Grange Insurance
aerosynapse/world/graph_encoder.pyillustrative
def encode(observation) -> EnvGraph:
g = EnvGraph()
for obj in observation.segments():
node = g.add(obj.kind, obj.position) # obstacle | waypoint | free-space
for a, b in g.pairs():
g.connect(a, b,
risk=collision_risk(a, b),
cost=traversal_cost(a, b))
# the policy reasons over relationships, not pixels
return g
Navigation is a relational problem

A flat perception model sees objects — a graph sees relationships between obstacles, goals, risk, and motion constraints. That structural representation is what makes zero-shot generalization tractable.

From: Graph-Based RL for UAV Autonomy
sdt/schema/ingest_constraints.sqlillustrative
CREATE TABLE endpoint_inventory (
host_id text PRIMARY KEY,
source text NOT NULL
CHECK (source IN ('ad','cisco_amp','defender')),
hostname text NOT NULL CHECK (hostname ~ '^[a-z0-9\-\.]+$'),
last_seen timestamptz NOT NULL,
-- three tools, one boundary: disagreement fails loudly here
CONSTRAINT fresh CHECK (last_seen > now() - interval '90 days')
);
A validated schema is a security control

Most data-quality problems in security ops are not adversarial — they are inconsistent tooling assumptions meeting at a shared data boundary. Validation rules caught 95% of non-compliant entries at ingestion.

From: Security Discovery Tool · Park Place
football_iq/schema/coach_corrections.sqlillustrative
CREATE TABLE coach_corrections (
id bigserial PRIMARY KEY,
label_id bigint REFERENCES labels(id),
corrected_by text NOT NULL, -- the coach, not the model
old_value jsonb NOT NULL,
new_value jsonb NOT NULL,
clip_id bigint REFERENCES clips(id),
-- every correction becomes Toledo-specific training data
exported_to_dataset boolean DEFAULT false
);
The correction flywheel is the moat

Correction workflows must be built before advanced models. Private, corrected, domain-specific data beats any off-the-shelf model at Toledo football terminology — the flywheel is the competitive advantage.

From: Toledo Football IQ
NowUpdated · June 2026

What I'm actively learning, building, and chasing outside of work.

Learning
In Progress
Become an Application Integration Professional
Oracle · OCI Application Integration
Drive AI Transformation in Your Organization
Microsoft · Course AB-731T00-A
Building
Active
Student Athlete Health Insurance Site
Toledo Athletics
Athletics Onboarding Website
Toledo Athletics
Football Performance Metrics: CV Model
Computer Vision · In progress
Pursuing
Upcoming
OCI Certified Application Integration Professional
Oracle · Exam 1Z0-1042-26
Microsoft Certified: AI Transformation Leader
Exam prep underway
Contact— Let's talk about building something real.
Available · Toledo, OH

Open to roles in AI research, ML engineering, and data science.

Whether it's a full-time opportunity, research collaboration, or just a conversation about autonomous systems — I'm listening.

SEND →firas.azfar@gmail.com
Open toAI ResearchML EngineeringData ScienceRobotics & AutonomyComputer VisionSports AnalyticsFull-Time RolesResearch Collab
Channels
Location
Toledo, OH
Response
Within 24 hours