Applied AI / ML

Hi, I'm Ahmad.

Computer Science student at AUB on the MEPI-TLU full-ride scholarship. My interests sit mostly at the model level: multimodal systems, reasoning models, and agents. But I've been moving into AI engineering as well, since building a model isn't the same as being able to ship and host it as something that actually runs. I like doing both ends myself. My best work so far: Genau, a cloud-based search engine; a campus-focused image style transfer model; and Connect 4, built in C.

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Ahmad Zeid Beirut, Lebanon

Selected work

A few things I've built, grouped by what they taught me.

Distributed systems

Genau

2026

A cloud-based search engine built from scratch and deployed on Amazon EC2. A multithreaded crawler that respects robots.txt feeds a custom distributed key-value store, and a Flame batch engine runs a TF-IDF and PageRank ranking pipeline.

The query front-end returns ranked results in well under a second, with key-value lookups parallelized and ranking values pre-computed so they stay cheap at query time.

JavaAWS EC2Distributed systemsTF-IDFPageRankSpark-style batch
Pipeline · AWS EC2 Crawler Multithreaded robots.txt KV store Distributed Parallel reads Flame Batch engine TF-IDF Ranker PageRank Sub-second
Crawl → store → batch → rank
ML · Computer vision

Campus image style transfer

2026

A conditional image-to-image model that re-renders campus photographs across weather and time of day: sunny, rainy, and night. I collected and curated a custom dataset of geolocated shots with standardized viewpoints, then engineered condition encodings for each axis.

I compared diffusion and GAN-based architectures, evaluating them with LPIPS perceptual similarity and condition-classification accuracy on a held-out set.

PyTorchDiffusionGANsLPIPSCustom dataset
Low-level systems

Connect-4 engine in C

2025

A two-player, 6-by-7 Connect-4 written in C for a minimal Linux VM, with full win detection and input validation. It ships three bot tiers, easy, medium, and hard, built on a minimax search.

I debugged and hardened it with GDB and Valgrind.

CMinimaxGDBValgrindLinux

Education

American University of Beirut Beirut · 2024–2027

B.S. Computer Science, Minor in Statistics

Attending on the MEPI-TLU full-ride scholarship · 3.84 GPA

University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia · Spring 2026

Study Abroad Semester

I spent a semester at Penn, where I took Applied Machine Learning and Internet and Web Systems.

Reading and interests Curiosities Papers, ideas, and things I keep coming back to, including a deep dive on my favorite airplane.