About me

About Me

I currently hold an Adjunct Professor position at the Département de génie logiciel et des technologies de l’information (LOG-TI) at ÉTS Montréal. From late 2023 to 2025, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher with the Cloud-2-Edge (C2E) lab under management and supervision of Dr. Julien Gascon-Samson. In 2023, I worked as a security evaluator at SGS-Brightsight in Delft, the Netherlands. I received my PhD in Nanoelectronics & Nanotechnology (equivalent to Computer Engineering in North America) in 2022 from the École doctorale Électronique, électrotechnique, automatique, traitement du signal (EEATS) at Grenoble Alpes University (UGA) in France. During my PhD studies, I collaborated internally with UGA’s cybersecurity institute, and internationally with IS-WiN lab at Northern Arizona University and Clemson University in the United States.

I designed the IND-520 course on Réalisation d’une solution IdO, and taught in the summer of 2025 at ÉTS.

My research interests are:

• Information Security.
• Applied Cryptography and Key-Exchange Protocols.
• Homomorphic Encryption and its application in Language Models.
• Data Privacy in Distributed Machine Learning.
• Federated Learning at the Edge.
• Security and Data Privacy in IoT.
• Authentication and Authorization in Agentic AI.
• Task Automation with Agentic AI, MCP, and A2A protocols.
• Blackbox Heuristic and Meta-Heuristic Optimization methods.
• Optimizing Task Placement and Scheduling in Federated Learning Ecosystems.

Early Career as a Researcher

During my 2 years of postdoc work, I led the design and development in the SDFLMQ project. SDFLMQ is a semi-decentralized federated learning framework that uses MQTT for communication and data exchange. SDFLMQ is designed to be lightweight, and suitable for constrained systems at the edge to perform FL at faster pace with marginal power consumption and memory cost. Aside to SDFLMQ, I collaborated in various other projects, including FEDORA – A Federated Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for DAG-based task offloading and resource allocation in MEC, and MQTT2EdgePeer – a Robust and Scalable Brokerless Peer-to-Peer Edge Middleware for Topic-Based Publish/Subscribe. I also served as the chair organizer of the 218 Colloquium: A workshop on the synergy between AI and Software Engineering at the well-known ACFAS 92nd Congress, in Montreal, Canada.

I worked for 4 years as a research intern and later a research and teaching assistant at LCIS. I worked on various subjects including deep learning-based side-channel analysis, and machine learning and deep learning techniques to improve cryptographic data processing for constrained cyber-physical systems, taught over 100 hours of lab and theory classes, and designed a course on the Fundamentals of Physically Unclonable Functions at Grenoble INP Esisar.

During my Ph.D at UGA, I led several projects, including the development of a methodology for ML-based authentication and enrollment of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), advancements in PUF modeling using transfer learning and subspace modeling, and the design of a lightweight authentication and key-exchange protocol for PUF-enabled embedded systems.

Career as a Software Developer

Before switching my career focus to research, I worked as a software developer, primarily focusing on video games. Between 2011 and 2016, during my B.Sc. studies in Tehran, I worked part-time as a software engineer and gameplay programmer. I contributed to several small-scale mobile games at Karina Mobile Solutions and Medrick Game Studio, both based in Tehran.

I was also a founding member of an indie game development team during this period, working on various PC game titles and a game design tool to enhance 2D game creation in the Unity3D engine.