👋 Welcome!

Hi, I’m Ali! Welcome to my academic homepage.

I am a second-year Ph.D. student and University Fellow in Computer Science at Temple University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Eduard C. Dragut.

My research focuses on multimodal AI, graph reasoning, and structured diagrammatic understanding. I study how Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and LLMs interpret complex visual and conceptual structures—especially Entity-Relationship diagrams (ERDs) and flowcharts—through benchmark creation (e.g., ERUnderstand, SeeTheFlow) and robust NL-to-Cypher semantic evaluation and diagnosis.

Before joining Temple, I earned my Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT) in 2024. My earlier research includes work published at ICWR 2023 on transformer-based Persian language recognition.

🚀 Internship Search: I am actively seeking a research internship where I can apply multimodal ML, structured reasoning, and LLM evaluation expertise to real-world AI systems.

🔬 Research Interests

• 🖼️ Multimodal AI & Vision–Language Models (VLMs)
• 🗄️ Natural Language Interfaces for Databases (NL-to-Cypher / Text-to-Graph)
• 📊 Diagrammatic Reasoning (Entity–Relationship Diagrams, Flowcharts)
• 🔍 LLM & VLM Benchmarking, Evaluation, and Diagnosis
• 🕸️ Graph Machine Learning & Structured Knowledge Representation
• 🧠 Deep Learning & Natural Language Processing

📢 Updates & News

• [Sep 2026] 🎉 Attended and presented our demo paper, “CypherLens: An Interactive Demo for Evaluating and Diagnosing NL-to-Cypher Systems,” at VLDB 2026 in Boston, MA!
• [Aug 2026] 👨‍🏫 Started as a Teaching Assistant for Mathematical Concepts in Computing II at Temple University.
• [Feb 2026] 🏛️ I had the wonderful opportunity to present my paper (currently under review), “ERUnderstand,” to the Database Group at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn)!
• [Jan 2026] 👨‍🏫 I started a new role as a Teaching Assistant for the Projects in Data Science course at Temple University.