Pedram Agand

Last updated: March 2026

Pedram Agand

Pedram Agand

Applied Scientist II, Amazon Alexa · AI Systems Researcher

LinkedIn · GitHub · Google Scholar · X

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Experience

Applied Scientist II·Amazon Alexa
Feb 2025 — Present

Vancouver, BC

  • Led category-agnostic implicit NER with negative sampling to decouple extraction from classification — improved accuracy by 7.2%, reduced missing-entity by 68%, eliminated false positives
  • Designed self-consistency mechanism and entity-resolution pipeline cutting manual annotation time by 85%
  • Built enterprise-scale AWS monitoring system that auto-triggers LLMaJ integration tests on a gating dataset; live dashboards detect drift and flag configuration regressions
  • Owned cross-functional deployment of RFC-compliant content-integrity models; guardrails for toxicity, hallucination, and prompt leakage — 98% safety-benchmark pass rate without latency degradation
  • Engineered deterministic post-processing and resilient parsers (regex → robust) for temporal intent classification with integrated A/B testing, restoring extraction accuracy and downstream API interoperability
SDE / ML Engineer·DaTu — SFU Education Technology Lab
May 2022 — Jan 2025

Burnaby, BC · pagand/AITutor_SeqModeling

  • Trained BERT for score prediction with contrastive learning — improved accuracy by 21%
  • Designed and deployed an agent-based LLM orchestrator (Llama3 + vector DB + LangGraph) for personalized hints; controlled evaluation improved metric_grade 72.7% and engagement 65.1%
  • Built LLMaS for synthetic data generation statistically matching real-learner profiles; adaptive treatment improved BKT probability by 19.6% and reduced attempts per question 4.7% vs. control
Scholar / AI Engineer·BCAHL — Vancouver Coastal Health
Apr 2024 — Jul 2024

Vancouver, BC · pagand/ragprop

  • Fine-tuned a self-corrective RAG agent (Phi3 + QLoRA + LangGraph) to extract information from meeting notes and transcripts — reduced staff data-collection time by ~6 hours/week
Research Assistant·NRC — SFU Joint Project
Sep 2021 — 2024

Burnaby, BC · pagand/NRC

  • Implemented ETL pipelines to analyse 2 years of ferry operational data with DNN and ensembles
  • Led and mentored 2 USRA students and 1 intern in prototyping DL models for industry-scale data — resulted in 2 published research papers; communicated results to non-technical stakeholders
ML Researcher Intern·Borealis AI (RBC)
Sep 2022 — Dec 2022

Vancouver, BC

  • Research: estimated density ratio via attention-based network and propensity score estimator in finance
  • Engineering: CI/CD pipelines, Slurm cluster, foundation models, MLflow, CR/PR, unit tests
ML Researcher Intern·Breeze Traffic
Apr 2021 — Aug 2021

Vancouver, BC · pagand/Eco-Light

  • Developed EcoLight, a reward-shaping DRL framework for traffic signal control — reduced CO₂ emissions by 11.3% while limiting travel-time increase to 2.7% (NeurIPS-W 2021)
Research Assistant·Huawei — SFU Joint Project
Jan 2020 — Nov 2020

Burnaby, BC · pagand/human_prediction

  • Led development of a particle-filter Bayesian predictor for human navigation, replacing brute-force search — reduced multi-step prediction errors by up to 44% in simulation and ~33% in real-world (ICRA 2022)

Education

PhD, Computer ScienceSimon Fraser University
GPA 4.08 / 4.33

Agentic AI, LLM alignment, sequential modeling, offline RLAdvisors: M. Chen, E. Park

MSc, Computer ScienceSimon Fraser University
GPA 4.13 / 4.33

Calibrated uncertainty estimation, robotic perception, NeurIPS and IROS publicationsAdvisors: M. Chen, A. Lim

MSc, Electrical EngineeringK.N. Toosi University of Technology

Robotics, control systems, telesurgery teleoperation (ARAS Lab)

BSc, Electrical EngineeringK.N. Toosi University of Technology

Control engineering, systems theory

Skills

LLM
FineTuneAlignment (RLHF/DPO)NLULangChain (Graph)Agentic AIPEFTHNSW
Sci. Computing
PyTorchHuggingFaceWandbJupyterMultimodal FusionMicroservice
Software Development
PythonCAWS cloud (Lambda, Step Function, Bedrock, CloudWatch)
Other
LinuxSQLBashDockerGitCUDAA/B testFastAPIScikit-learnRetrieval/Ranking

Certificates

Highlighted Projects

arXiv 2026
VeNRA: Verifiable Numerical Reasoning Agent

Neuro-symbolic agent combining typed Universal Fact Ledgers with deterministic Python execution for financial AI. <0.3% hallucination rate vs. 12–18% for RAG baselines.

ICRA 2026
Beyond Static Datasets: Robust Offline Policy Optimization

Offline RL approach for robust policy optimization under distributional shift, targeting real-world deployment scenarios where online interaction is limited or unsafe.

Highlighted Publications

IROS 2024DMFuser: Distilled Multi-Task Learning for Transformer-Based Multi-modal Fusionpagand/e2etransfuser
AAAI 2024Sequential Modeling of Complex Marine Navigationpagand/model_optimze_vessel
CVPR-VCAD 2023LeTFuser for Autonomous Driving with Multi-Task Learningpagand/e2etransfuser
Ocean Eng. 2023Fuel Consumption Prediction for a Ferry using ML and In-service Datapagand/model_optimze_vessel
IROS 2023DRL Traffic Signal Controls with Optimized CO2 Emissions
ICRA 2022Human Navigational Intent Inference with Probabilistic and Optimal Approaches
NeurIPS-W 2021EcoLight: Reward Shaping in DRL for Environment Friendly Traffic Signal Controlpagand/Eco-Light

View all projects & publications →

Honors & Awards

CS Research Day Award — Third place poster (DMODE)2022
Graduate Fellowship (~55K CAD) · Simon Fraser University2019
Entrance Scholarship (10K CAD) · SFU Graduate Dean2019
Best Paper and Best Researcher Award — oral presentation, particle filters · K.N. Toosi University of Technology2017
Best Paper Award — ICROM international conference2016
Exceptional Talent Admission for M.Sc. · K.N. Toosi University of Technology2014
Ranked 3/38 in Control Engineering, 5/248 in ECE (B.Sc.) · K.N. Toosi University of Technology2013

Videos

I Read Every Prompt Engineering Guide. Here Is What Actually Works.

I Read Every Prompt Engineering Guide. Here Is What Actually Works.

Why Your Technical Interview Prep Is Wrong — and How AI Fixes It

Why Your Technical Interview Prep Is Wrong — and How AI Fixes It

SageMaker AI Is Not the Right Way to Use LLMs

SageMaker AI Is Not the Right Way to Use LLMs

Autonomous Driving: From Sensor Fusion to End-to-End Control

Autonomous Driving: From Sensor Fusion to End-to-End Control

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Writing

Are All Large Models Learning the Same Thing?2026-04-07LLMs Are Stateless. Here Is How to Build Systems That Are Not.2026-04-07LLM Fine-Tuning Has Three Phases — Here Is How to Pick Yours2026-04-07LLM Architecture Is a Decision, Not a Default2026-04-07
Read all writing →