Background

I’m currently exploring new ideas in AI while being on a nomadic journey around the world….

I started Pyte (aka CipherMode Labs Inc) together with Ilya in 2020 and the company was acqruied in Feb 2025 by All Hands AI.

I received my PhD from the ECE Department at UC San Diego. Checkout my thesis: “Towards a Private New World: Algorithm, Protocol, and Hardware Co-Design for Large-Scale Secure Computation” (best Ph.D. thesis award, 2020).

I did my undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology. I worked on “Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP)-based Brain Computer Interfaces” (best B.Sc. thesis award, 2014).

During summer 2016, I was a software developer intern at Microsoft in Azure Cloud Platform. In summer 2017, I was a Program Manager intern in Microsoft enterprise division working on Windows Defender Application Guard.

In Summer 2018, I started project HEAX at Microsoft AI & Research in Redmond Labs. The project creates a new hardware platform based on FPGAs for privacy-preserving computation.

Previous life: Astrophysics (Silver Medal in International Student Olympiad, 2010)