Ali Lesani

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Experiences

Machine Learning Engineer | Kisoji Biotechnology Inc.Aug 2025 - Present

  • Architected and deployed an agentic RAG platform enabling natural-language querying over internal documents and structured databases, implementing end-to-end RAG pipelines and intelligent tool routing between document retrieval and NL2SQL, with CLI and Streamlit interfaces deployed on AWS.
  • Built an automated PDF image extraction and classification system using embedding-based similarity against reference images, exposed via FastAPI REST API with web UI and CLI support.
  • Architected and deployed scalable cloud infrastructure on AWS, configuring VPCs, subnets, Internet Gateways, routing tables, security groups, and IAM roles; containerized multi-service applications using Docker and Docker Compose, served via Nginx reverse proxy, and automated deployments using GitHub Actions CI/CD.

NLP Specialist (RA) | Office of Associate Dean, University of WaterlooJan 2025 - Aug 2025

  • Contributed to the development of an automated NLP-based comment classification system for student course evaluations, using Sentence Transformer (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) embeddings and a KNN classifier to identify and filter inappropriate feedback.
  • Implemented Python pipelines for data preparation, model training, evaluation, and batch inference.

AI & Machine Learning Researcher (PhD Student) | CViSS Lab, University of WaterlooSep 2023 - Present

  • PhD Research
    • Developing a spatio-temporal vision–language system for automated infrastructure inspection, enabling component-level change detection across multi-cycle UAV imagery by reasoning over time with text-conditioned VLMs that produce interpretable natural-language change reports and grounded pixel-level evidence.
  • Mitacs Intern | Nav CanadaJan 2026 - Present
    • Developed a computer vision system to compute Runway Occupancy Time (ROT) by detecting and tracking aircraft in airport video feeds, implementing small-object detection using SAHI combined with object detectors and monitoring runway-entry and exit events to accurately measure aircraft presence during takeoff and landing.
  • Mitacs Intern | RBC Royal BankJan 2025 - Apr 2025
    • Developed a monocular window measurement system for energy auditors to estimate window dimensions from single images, integrating Grounded SAM for window segmentation, monocular metric depth estimation, and camera-geometry–based 3D projection using known intrinsics to compute accurate width and height. [ GitHub]
  • Mitacs Intern | Rogers CommunicationsSep 2024 - Dec 2024
    • Developed SDG-SAM, a zero-shot instance segmentation pipeline for fine-grained detection of cell tower components in UAV imagery, integrating saliency-based foreground extraction, monocular depth estimation (Depth Anything), open-vocabulary detection (Grounding DINO), and foundation-model segmentation (SAM) to handle complex outdoor scenes with heavy clutter and occlusions. [ GitHub]

Software Developer & Graduate Researcher | INSURER Lab, Sharif University of TechnologySep 2020 - May 2023

  • Worked as a developer on Rtx, a C++ and Qt-based simulation software for probabilistic modeling, reliability, and resilience analysis of large-scale infrastructure systems.
  • Implemented agent-based models to simulate disaster impacts and interdependent infrastructure behavior.
  • Developed modules for assessing community-scale risk and resilience across varying levels of model refinement.
  • Contributed to probabilistic simulation workflows for evaluating post-disaster recovery and system performance.

Education

  • Doctor of Philosophy, Engineering | University of Waterloo2023 - Present
  • Master of Science, Engineering | Sharif University of Technology2019 - 2022
  • Bachelor of Science, Engineering | Sahand University of Technology2015 - 2019

Technical Skills & Tools

Python

Python

C++

C++

PyTorch

PyTorch

HuggingFace

HuggingFace

LangChain

LangChain

scikit-learn

Scikit-learn

OpenCV

OpenCV

FastAPI

FastAPI

Streamlit

Streamlit

Pandas

Pandas

SQL

SQL

AWS

AWS

Docker

Docker

Nginx

Nginx

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions

Git

Git

Bash

Bash

Linux

Linux