Istiaq Ahmed Fahad is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at BRAC University. He completed his Bachelor's in Software Engineering from the Institute of Information Technology (IIT), University of Dhaka and continuing the Master's in the same institution.

He began his research career as a research assistant at the Distributed Systems & Software Engineering (DSSE) Research Group at the University of Dhaka, working on source code watermarking. He later joined the Data & Design Lab, where he built a real-time power consumption monitoring dashboard. At the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), he developed SmartGeoRef, a tool that converts static maps into GeoJSON for regional economic analysis. He also completed a research internship under Prof. Darko Marinov at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through the UIUC+ Summer Research Program in Software Engineering. His research interests include AI safety, Responsible AI, AI4SE, Agentic AI systems, Computer Vision for Pathology Image Analysis. 

Before joining BRAC University, he worked as a Trainee Software Engineer at Cefalo Bangladesh Limited, where he built payroll system modules, and also served as a Software Engineer Intern at Vivasoft Limited. He has also taught Python and AI for Research at the University of Dhaka with a diverse set of students across different professionals.

Beyond academics, he was a member of the Aspire Leaders Program (Cohort 3), a leadership development program with masterclasses led by Harvard Business School faculty. At the IIT Software Engineering Community (IITSEC), he served as Seminar and Library Secretary, organizing seminars on Blockchain and emerging technologies and managing a CTF event at ITVerse 2023. He also served as Program Management Director at the Bangladesh Youngster Social Organization (BYSO), leading community programs and fundraising for flood-affected communities. In his free time, he enjoys photography, marathon running, watching anime and travelling.

2026

• Fahad, I. A., & Fuad, M. M. N. (2026). Can We Trust the Source? A Systematic Review of Watermarking and Attribution for AI-Generated Code. Information and Software Technology, Elsevier, 108157. (Quartile: Q1)
• Hasan, M., Fahad, I. A., Arefin, M. F., & Khan, M. M. (2026). CHARD: Characteristic-Aware Hierarchical Detection for Bangladesh Road Scenes. IEEE Access. Accepted for publication. (Quartile: Q1)
• Fahad, I. A., Fuad, M. M. N., & Sakib, K. (2026). PromptMark: A Prompt-Guided Iterative-Feedback Framework for Source Code Watermarking. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering. 
• Fahad, I. A., Asif, K., & Tawhid, M. N. A. (2026). Mitigating LLM Sycophancy in Code Smell Detection Using Evidence-Guided Reasoning Prompts. arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.10411. 

2025

• Fahad, I. A., Arean, A. I. H., Ahmed, N. S., & Hasan, M. (2025). Automatic Vehicle Detection Using DETR: A Transformer-Based Approach for Navigating Treacherous Roads. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.17843. 
• Fahad, I. A., Asif, K., & Sikder, S. (2025). BanglaFake: Constructing and Evaluating a Specialized Bengali Deepfake Audio Dataset. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.10885. 

Work Experience

• Lecturer, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
  BRAC University, Bangladesh  
  Duration: 2026 – Present
• Course Instructor (Python, AI for Research & Data Analysis)
  Institute of Information Technology (IIT), University of Dhaka, Bangladesh  
  Duration: 2025 – 2026
• Trainee Software Engineer
  Cefalo Bangladesh Limited, Bangladesh  
  Duration: 2024 – 2025
• Software Engineer Intern 
  Vivasoft Limited, Bangladesh  
  Duration: 2023 – 2024
• Assistant ERP System Analyst
  Chittagong University ERP Project, Bangladesh  
  Duration: 2023
• Python Developer
  Optagen Technologies, Bangladesh  
  Duration: 2021 – 2022

Research Experience

• Research Assistant, Distributed Systems & Software Engineering (DSSE) Research Group
  University of Dhaka, Bangladesh  
  Duration: 2025 – Present
• Research Assistant, Data & Design Lab (DnD Lab)
  University of Dhaka, Bangladesh  
  Duration: 2025 – 2026
• Research Assistant
  Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), Bangladesh  
  Duration: 2026
• Research Intern, UIUC+ Summer Research Program in Software Engineering
  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA  
  Duration: 2024

• Research Fellowship (2026), ICT Division, Government of Bangladesh: Selected for Master's thesis proposal
• Undergraduate Scholarship (2026), University of Dhaka: Awarded for securing 2nd position in undergraduate studies
• Ranked 6th (out of 85 teams, 2025), AI Engineering Hackathon by Poridhi.io: Developed an intent-based semantic search system using Qdrant and BERT
• Ranked 6th (out of 70+ teams, 2025), BUET DL Sprint 3.0: Fine-tuned Qwen-7B and BanglaT5 for low-resource mathematical reasoning
• Ranked 4th (out of 47 teams, 2024), IUT CSE Fest Datathon: Developed a Bengali ASR model trained on 79+ hours of speech data
• Ranked 2nd (2024), Dhaka University Innovation Fair: Developed EmPower, an interactive learning tool for autistic children
• Ranked 3rd (out of 80+ teams, 2024), SUST DL Enigma Developed an object detection system for Bangladeshi roads using YOLO and DETR
• Top 2% (2024),  Learnathon 2.0: out of 1800+ participants. Completed a 6-month intensive program focused on JavaScript, React, and Next.js with paid project contributions
• Rising Star Award (2020), IIT Emerging Cup Coding Contest (2020): Recognized for exceptional performance in an internal coding contest

• MSc in Software Engineering
  University of Dhaka (2025 – Ongoing)

• BSc in Software Engineering
  University of Dhaka (2020 – 2025)

• Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSC)
  Rajuk Uttara Model College (2017-2019)

• Secondary School Certificate (SSC)
  Rajuk Uttara Model College (2015-2017)