Hello, I'm Syed M. Affan.

I'm a product-facing full-stack AI developer at KUEC. These days, I'm also building Notch, and running Socia, on a mission to curate the most active builder community in the UAE.

Away from work, I play table tennis, vlog my experiences, and occasionally direct short films. I also love hackathons and now host them under Socia.

  • NotchApril 2026 to present

    A workspace for meetings, presentations, and demos: a voice-following teleprompter plus recording, editing, and recaps, with 1,500+ trial downloads and 100+ paying users.

    • Started as an offline, voice-following teleprompter (Electron, Vosk, TypeScript) and is growing into one connected workspace to prepare for, deliver, record, and revisit meetings, presentations, and demos.
    • The teleprompter stays the entry point. Writer turns rough notes into a script, screen recording captures the moment, a built-in editor handles auto-zoom, captions, and cuts, and Recap brings back what was said afterwards.
    • Privacy-first by design: voice-following and processing run locally, with no accounts or cloud dependency.
    • Built for people whose work is calls and follow-up, such as sales and account teams, customer success, educators, consultants, and team leads, and shaped by 1:1 customer discovery on positioning, UX, pricing, and roadmap.
    • Launched at a 24-hour virtual sprint run through Socia, then scaled to 1,500+ trial downloads and 100+ paying users.
  • UVentureApril 2026 to present

    A national AI platform that carries university research from invention disclosure to commercialization for five stakeholder groups, now in pilot UAT with Khalifa University and MOHESR.

    • Leading a six-person team building a unified platform that moves research from idea and invention disclosure through IP review, industry collaboration, investment, and commercialization for five stakeholder groups.
    • Own end-to-end product and technical delivery across architecture, development, QA, stakeholder discovery, pilot deployments, and demos, including conversations on multi-university adoption.
    • Built AI capabilities for document intelligence, semantic search, prior-art support, missing-information detection, research-to-partner matching, and decision-ready reports using retrieval-augmented generation and vector search.
    • Now in pilot-stage user acceptance testing with Khalifa University and MOHESR.
  • An autonomous data scientist built for the MBZUAI K2 Think hackathon: give it a dataset and a five-stage agentic pipeline plans, codes, tunes, and evaluates a model in under a minute, with reproducible code behind every result.

    • Developed for the MBZUAI K2 Think hackathon, designing a five-stage agentic workflow (EDA, Plan, Synthesize, Train, Evaluate) coordinated by the K2-Think model.
    • Optimized the full pipeline to under a minute, including LLM reasoning, a 20-trial Optuna hyperparameter search, and model training.
    • Built a deterministic code-synthesis engine on Jinja2 templates so every generated ML script is reproducible and auditable.
    • Streams progress to a Next.js interface over SSE and Redis, and produces an evaluation report and a business dashboard from every run.
  • FillyComing soon

    A review-first Chrome extension that plans an entire job application in one pass, grounds every answer in your own evidence, and never clicks submit.

    • Matches exact profile values in code, then plans the whole form in one batch as typed actions: text, dropdown, radio, checkbox, file upload, skip, or needs review.
    • Resolves ambiguous fields against saved evidence and the options actually available on the page, and withholds any answer it cannot support.
    • Keeps the profile and documents local in IndexedDB, parses resumes into the profile, and never clicks final submit.
    • Ships with Meaning Find, a companion extension that searches a page by meaning and highlights the original passages.
    • Covered by 29 automated tests across evidence selection, uncertain choices, and relay security.
  • A retrieval-augmented pipeline that turns dense railway legal documents into question answering and BPMN process models, built during my AI lab internship at Ab Ovo.

    • Built a RAG pipeline that converts legal documents into real-time B2B insight using vector databases and prompt engineering.
    • Implemented semantic chunking and embedding pipelines, testing Hugging Face models to improve retrieval quality.
    • Experimented with instruction tuning and LoRA fine-tuning on Llama 3 variants for railway-domain fidelity.
  • CDPCF2026

    A cultural data provenance and compliance framework that protects intangible heritage from unauthorized AI training, placing 2nd at the UN Global SDG Public Policy Innovation Challenge out of 866 teams.

    • Designed a framework for tracing the provenance of cultural data and checking its use against compliance rules, so intangible heritage is not used in AI training without authorization.
    • Took 2nd place at the UN Global SDG Public Policy Innovation Challenge, representing the UAE in China as the Middle East’s only finalist out of 866 teams.
  • UAVMS2025

    Drone identity verification that fuses computer vision with indoor positioning, reaching 90.5% mAP on a 50,000+ image dataset.

    • Combines computer vision with indoor positioning to verify drone identity.
    • Reached 90.5% mAP, trained and evaluated on a dataset of more than 50,000 images.
  • A YOLOv9 flood-mapping pipeline that turns satellite imagery into faster disaster-response planning, winning 1st place among 14 teams.

    • Built a YOLOv9 pipeline that maps flooded areas from satellite imagery.
    • Aimed at faster, better-informed disaster-response planning.
    • Won 1st place among 14 teams at the Zayed University Digital Transformation Hackathon.
  • An AI sustainability scanner that turns a product’s environmental impact into a better shopping decision, winning 1st place among 13 teams.

    • An AI-assisted scanner that turns a product’s environmental impact into a practical shopping decision.
    • Won 1st place among 13 teams at the Smart Mobile Application Contest.
  • Building AI-native solutions across Khalifa University Enterprises Company, leading product and development from UVenture to internal tooling and client engagements.

    • Lead product and development for AI-native solutions at KUEC, owning the path from discovery and architecture to build, QA, pilot, and demo.
    • Flagship work is UVenture, a national research commercialization platform built with a six-person team and now in pilot-stage UAT with Khalifa University and MOHESR.
    • Build internal tooling that automates and augments the team’s own workflows, and take on client engagements end to end, from requirements through delivery.
    • Run stakeholder discovery and turn requirements into product, including discussions on multi-university adoption.
    • Build the AI layer behind these products: document intelligence, semantic search, prior-art support, research-to-partner matching, and decision-ready reports using RAG and vector search.
  • Co-Founder & COO, SociaMay 2025 to present

    Co-founded and scaled a UAE-based hackathon community and builder network to 1,000+ builders across 70+ colleges, leading partnerships, programs, and events.

    • Scaled the UAE’s fastest-growing hackathon network to 1,000+ builders across all seven emirates and 100+ institutions.
    • Closed and manage delivery of an eight-month paid engagement with the National MS Society UAE, building a letter-of-intent and grant management system into their legacy workflows.
    • Secured partnerships with Replit, 42 Abu Dhabi, and Odoo Middle East DMCC, running discovery calls, proposals, and design.
    • Ran a five-day Odoo bootcamp, a 250-application buildathon with 42 Abu Dhabi and Replit, and the 24-hour virtual sprint that launched Notch.
  • Built retrieval, semantic chunking, and embedding pipelines that turn railway legal documents into real-time B2B insight.

    • Built a RAG pipeline that turns legal documents into real-time B2B insight using vector databases and prompt engineering.
    • Experimented with instruction tuning and LoRA fine-tuning on Llama 3 variants for railway-domain fidelity.
    • Implemented semantic chunking and embedding pipelines, testing Hugging Face models along the way.
  • Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Fellow, Khalifa UniversityOct 2024 to Feb 2025

    Applied and benchmarked hybrid transformer models for low-latency binary and multi-class intrusion detection.

    • Applied custom transformers to sequence classification on tabular data for low-latency intrusion detection.
    • Benchmarked hybrid transformer models against GLM, XGBoost, and Random Forest for binary and multi-class classification in vehicular environments.
    • Led to the HyTEN paper, published at IEEE IWCMC 2026.
  • Software Engineering Intern, Siemens Industrial LLCJun to Aug 2024

    Built a Python and JavaScript KPI automation tool that cut customer-service data-processing time by 80%.

    • Built a Python and JavaScript KPI automation tool for customer-service data.
    • Cut data-processing time by 80%.
  • Khalifa University2021 to 2025

    BSc in Computer Engineering. Graduated with Excellence with Honors.

  • UN Global SDG Public Policy Innovation Challenge2026

    2nd place. Represented the UAE in China as the Middle East’s only finalist, selected from 866 teams and 4,000+ applicants across 100+ countries.

  • 1st place. University category for Baian, selected from 40+ projects.

  • 1st place. Among 104 teams for Socia.

  • 1st place. Among 14 teams for F.A.L.C.O.N.

  • 1st place. Regional award for Scrap-E, an AI-assisted e-waste recycling concept.

  • 1st place. Among 13 teams for GreenCart, an AI-powered sustainability scanner for more informed shopping.

  • 2nd KU Sustainability E-Gaming Competition2024

    3rd place. Built Eco Warrior Defense, a Scratch game designed to make environmental awareness more engaging.

  • Emirates Post Group Logistics Unleashed Competition2023

    2nd place. Prototyped a gravity-fed mail sorting system with machine learning for automated mail processing.

  • 1st KU Sustainability E-Gaming Competition2023

    3rd place. Built Recycle Rush, a Unity and C# mobile game that teaches younger audiences about recycling and sustainability.