Istiak Bin Mahmod

I completed my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in May 2023. I am now working as a Software Engineer at Optimizely. I am currently looking out for PhD opportunities in the field of Computer Science.

Education

Experience

Test Scores

• GRE: 320 (Quant: 165, Verbal: 155)
• TOEFL: 101 (Reading: 26, Listening: 27, Speaking: 23, Writing: 25)

Academic Projects

• Moodle LMS (Tools & technologies used: ReactJS, NodeJS, ExpressJS, MongoDB)

  We developed a Moodle LMS (Learning Management System) for our software engineering project. We utilized the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) to develop a web-based LMS platform. This website was inspired by https://moodle.cse.buet.ac.bd. Check out the Github repository. The demonstration video is available here.

• Blood Donating Platform (Tools & technologies used: Django, Javascript, HTML, CSS)

  We designed and developed a blood donation app as an undergraduate project. The website allows users to sign up as donors, specify their blood type, and provide their contact information. When a blood drive or a hospital requests blood, the app sends notifications to eligible donors in the area, allowing them to quickly and easily respond to the call for donation. Check this project on Github.

• Retro Shooting Game ( Tools & technologies used: C++, ATMega32)

  We built a retro shooting game using C++ and the ATMEGA32 microcontroller. This game features 2D graphics, simple and fast-paced action, and a focus on high scores and player skill. The goal is usually to achieve the highest score possible, either by surviving for as long as possible or by collecting points for defeating enemies. Check this project on Github. The Demonstration is available here.

Research

• What Kind of Contracts Do LLM APIs Need? - Design By Contract for LLM APIs
  • We are developing contract verification frameworks for LLM APIs to prevent common integration bugs. Through analysis of 200+ API contract violation cases, including 40+ LLM-specific instances, I created a comprehensive taxonomy and am building a design-by-contract tool for popular frameworks like OpenAI and LangChain. This work extends prior DLContracts research to provide automated contract checking that detects violations before deployment, improving reliability in LLM-powered applications.


• Undergraduate Thesis: Knowledge Graph-Based Categorization of Newspaper Articles in a Newspaper Corpus
  • Supervisor: Dr. Muhammad Masroor Ali, Collaborator: Soham Khisa
  • Our thesis proposed a newspaper categorization system that utilizes ontology to extract metadata from unstructured HTML news articles. We used the IPTC Media Topics taxonomy, which categorizes text using over 1200 terms, to categorize the articles based on ontology concepts

Skills

• Languages: Python, Java, C, C++, HTML5, CSS, Bash
• Frameworks/Libraries: React.js, Node.js, Django, Spring Boot
• Databases: Google Cloud Datastore, Oracle PL/SQL, MySQL, MongoDB
• Tools & Platforms: Git, Docker, Kubernetes, GCP, Linux

Research Interests

• Software Engineering
• Natural Language Processing
• Distributed Systems

Awards & Certifications

• Dean's List Award Outstanding performance during 1^st and 2^nd semester
• General Merit Scholarship Outstanding performance in Higher Secondary School Certificate Examination, Bangladesh Government, 2017-2021
• Talentpool Merit Scholarship Outstanding performance in Secondary School Certificate Examination, Bangladesh Government, 2016-2017
• Bangladesh Chemistry Olympiad Division Achieved 3rd position in the divisional round (Chittagong | Bangladesh)

Resume

You can download my resume from here.