Rahatul Ashakin

About Me

I work on AI and ML that are reliable and efficient. My experience spans finance and healthcare, including tuning FinBERT for sentiment and building a variational quantum model for cancer classification. I use both classical optimization and quantum methods such as QAOA and VQE, and I share clean code with clear steps to reproduce results. For a PhD, I want to study optimization for large models, robustness and privacy, and ML systems that run on real hardware in the cloud, on GPUs, and at the edge and in IoT. I am open to NLP, time series, tabular, and multimodal data, and to work that connects ML with security and data systems, with the goal of methods that are simple to use, grounded in theory, and ready for deployment in health, finance, and beyond.

Download CV GitHub LinkedIn Scholar

Rahatul Ashakin
Md Rahatul Ashakin
Prospective PhD Student


Education

  • Oct 2022 – Mar 2024 M.S., Information Technology — Washington University of Science and Technology, Alexandria, VA, USA
  • Sep 2013 – Aug 2018 B.S., Computer Science and Engineering — North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Research Interests

  • Optimization for reliable & efficient ML (classical + quantum-inspired: QAOA, VQE)
  • Trustworthy ML — robustness, calibration, interpretability
  • Privacy-preserving & federated learning — post-quantum security (FHE/HE), secure aggregation
  • Clinical & financial NLP — risk modeling, sentiment, information extraction
  • Hardware-/resource-aware deployment — edge/IoT systems and noisy quantum backends


Selected Publications

  1. Current Tools and Techniques of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (book chapter, forthcoming 2026)
    In: Quantum Computing in Medicine: Transforming Drug Discovery, Protein Folding, and Genomics Research through AI Integration (ed. Don Roosan), Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-443-34193-9.

    Book page →

  2. Under review
    Quantum Annealing of Financial Sentiment Analysis by Optimizing Large Language Model Hyperparameters
    Md Rahatul Ashakin, Christopher Stuetzle, Rubayat Khan, Saif Nirzhor, Don Roosan — under review at Financial Innovation (SpringerOpen).

    Manuscript available upon request.

  3. Variational Quantum Circuits for Molecular Classification Using Graph Neural Network
    Don Roosan, Md Rahatul Ashakin, Rubayat Khan, Hasiba Mashed Khan, Tiffany Khou, Maria-Isabel Carnasciali, Mohammad Rifat Haider
    International Conference on Quantum Communications, Networking, and Computing (QCNC), 2025

    Conference page doi:10.1109/QCNC64685.2025.00074

  4. Quantum Variational Transformer Model for Enhanced Cancer Classification
    Don Roosan, Rubayat Khan, Md Rahatul Ashakin, Tiffany Khou, Saif Nirzhor, Mohammad Rifat Haider
    IEAI 2025 (Bali) · IOS Press, Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering

    Publisher doi:10.3233/ATDE250557

  5. Adaptive Multimodal Artificial Intelligence with Liquid Neural Network for Edge Computing-Based Augmented Reality
    Don Roosan, Rubayat Khan, Md Rahatul Ashakin, Tiffany Khou
    IEAI 2025 (Bali) · IOS Press, Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering

    Publisher doi:10.3233/ATDE250512

  6. To appear
    Quantum AI Enhanced Blockchain Security for Drug Discovery
    Don Roosan, Tiffany Khou, Brian Pham, Yawen Li, Md Rahatul Ashakin, Hasiba Mashed Khan, Rubayat Khan, Mohammad Rifat Haider
    To appear in: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Innovation in Artificial Intelligence (ICIAI 2025), Springer LNEE 1458 (eBook due Nov 2025).

    SpringerLink proceedings page DOI: forthcoming



Online Certificates



Skills

Programming & Platforms: Python (PyTorch, scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas) · Qiskit · SQL · Git/Linux · MLflow/W&B · Docker (basic) · GPUs · cloud · edge/IoT

Trustworthy ML & Stats: Transformers · GNNs · multimodal fusion · robust training · calibration & uncertainty · ablations/error analysis

Quantum & Optimization: VQE/QAOA · hybrid C-Q workflows · QUBO/Ising mappings · quantum-guided HPO

Data Eng & Reproducibility: SQL · ETL · schema design · MLflow/W&B · env pinning · unit tests · CI/CD (Actions) · DVC

Specialized Skills: Privacy (HE, differential privacy) · Clinical NLP (HF fine-tuning, ASR) · Visualization (LaTeX, Matplotlib, dashboards)

Domains: Computational genomics · clinical decision support · financial sentiment