Experience · Md Touhidul Islam

Graduate Research Assistant

Pennsylvania State University — College of IST, a11y Lab

Jan 2021 – Present

Built and evaluated accessibility-oriented systems for blind and low-vision (BLV) interaction across desktop, mobile, and VR platforms.
Developed computer vision and vision-language model (VLM) reliability methods including evaluation frameworks, segmentation pipelines, and targeted model unlearning.
Published first-author papers at CHI, UIST (Best Paper HM), ASSETS, IMWUT, and DIS (Best Paper HM); received Outstanding Reviewer recognition at CHI'26.

Research and Development Engineer

Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)

Sep 2019 – Dec 2020

Built a distributed blockchain storage system with containerized microservices, reducing per-node storage by 50% (published at ICBC'20).
Developed a blockchain-based inventory management system for government ministries, enabling transparent and auditable tracking of inventory changes.

Software Engineer

Reve Systems

Nov 2017 – Aug 2019

Developed a Bengali screen reader with a custom OCR + TTS pipeline, improving word-level accuracy by 16% over the baseline.
Built core modules for a high-throughput distributed telecom billing system handling 20,000+ daily transactions with 40% lower latency than the legacy system — achieved through schema/index optimization and Kafka-based asynchronous processing.

Graduate Teaching Fellow

Pennsylvania State University — College of IST

Jan 2026 -- Present

Teaching the Distributed Object Computing (HCDD 411) course at IST, Penn State for Spring'26 Semester.

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Pennsylvania State University — College of IST

Spring 2022 – Fall 2025

Spring 2022 DS 440: Data Sciences Capstone Course
Spring 2022 DS 200: Introduction to Data Sciences
Fall 2022 DS 435: Ethical Issues in Data Science Practice
Spring 2023 IST 510: Foundations in Computational Informatics
Spring 2023 DS 220: Data Management for Data Sciences
Fall 2023 IST 311: Object-Oriented Design and Software Applications
Fall 2024 DS 440: Data Sciences Capstone Course
Fall 2024 IST 440W: Information Sciences and Technology Integration and Problem Solving
Spring 2025 IST 440W: Information Sciences and Technology Integration and Problem Solving
Fall 2025 DS 330: Visual Analytics for Data Sciences