Istiaq Ahmed Fahad

I am a Lecturer in the Department of CSE at BRAC University with a B.S. in Software Engineering (M.S. in Software Engineering ongoing at IIT, University of Dhaka) and a Research Assistant across three labs. My research interests span AI Safety & Responsible AI (alignment, interpretability, LLM evaluation), Trustworthy Generative AI (watermarking, attribution, provenance), AI for Software Engineering (AI4SE) (LLM-based code generation & analysis), and Agentic AI Systems (multi-agent frameworks, secure coding agents).

At the Distributed Systems & Software Engineering (DSSE) Research Group (Advisor: Dr. Kazi Muheymin-Us-Sakib), my Master’s thesis focuses on source code watermarking and attribution for AI-generated code on black-box API-only models, where I designed a prompt-guided iterative-feedback framework to improve embedding and detection. At the Data & Design Lab (DnD Lab) (Advisors: Dr. Moinul Islam Zaber & Dr. Sarker Tanveer Ahmed Rumee), I led end-to-end development of interactive dashboards for real-time power consumption monitoring translating stakeholder requirements into user-validated visualizations. At BIDS (Advisor: Dr. Atonu Rabbani), I built SmartGeoRef — converting static maps to GeoJSON and applying NLP-based analysis to assess regional economic impact across Bangladesh. I also spent time at UIUC+ Summer Research Program (Prof. Darko Marinov) reviewing code translation, readability, and bug detection literature and enhancing reproducibility/benchmarking pipelines for C and Rust. To learn about my research work check my Google Scholar / ResearchGate profiles.

Other than my academic career, I was Trainee Software Engineer at Cefalo Bangladesh Limited, Software Engineer Intern at Vivasoft, and Course Instructor at IIT, DU where I took courses on Python, AI for Research & Data Analysis and Big Data Analysis with MongoDB.