Abdollah Zakeri, Ph.D.I'm a Senior Data Scientist at C3.ai and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (University of Houston) specializing in computer vision, multimodal deep learning, and edge-deployable AI systems. I build production ML that moves the needle—from inventory optimization at enterprise scale to property appraisal intelligence and 3D perception for robotics. In academia, I led the AI/vision stack for an autonomous mushroom-harvesting robot, developing depth-inpainting for reliable 3D perception, species-aware growth/yield forecasting, and synthetic 3D scenes for pose estimation—integrated into a real-time, edge pipeline. My work spans healthcare and biometrics as well, including handwriting-based learning-disability risk modeling, pediatric COVID severity detection using ViTs on CXR, and lip-based biometrics. Industry-side, I've shipped multimodal models and full ML solutions for C3.ai's property appraisal product and R&D, and previously founded Pencode Software (delivering ML for X-ray tire inspection and more) while co-founding Nimrou, a consumer web/mobile startup serving 10k+ monthly users. I love turning ambiguous problems into measurable wins: clear objectives, robust data pipelines, fast iteration, and deployment discipline (containers, acceleration, monitoring). |
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- Design enterprise inventory-optimization and decision systems; build robust data pipelines and ML services.
- Own modeling lifecycle from objective definition to deployment (containers, acceleration, monitoring).
- Applied SOTA image models to property appraisal intelligence and R&D use cases.
- Evaluated/optimized LLMs & LMMs; shipped an end-to-end ML pipeline with multiple fine-tuned models.
- Mushroom Harvesting Robot (Perception Stack): data acquisition/labeling; detection & instance segmentation; depth-inpainting for reliable 3D perception; 3D pose estimation; real-time, edge deployment.
- Learning Disability (LD) Risk Assessment: multi-modal classification using handwriting essays & transcripts; multi-GPU training and cluster compute.
- Automated Essay Scoring (LLMs/LMMs): vision-language alignment for rubric-aware scoring.
- COVID-19 Severity for Pediatrics (TCH): ViT-based CXR models + clinical features; full DNN design/eval.
- WhisperNet (Lip Biometrics): Siamese network for visual-only person re-identification.
- Smart Tire Quality (Kavirtire): Python pre-processing and CNN classifier on X-ray videos for defect grouping.
- Delivered custom ML solutions; mentored student teams; organized programming competitions/training.
- Built backend/frontend & REST APIs; scaled consumer web/mobile product to 10k+ monthly users.
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Selected projects showcasing my work and research. |
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Project Summer 2023 – Present Development of a fully autonomous mushroom harvesting robot integrating RGB-D sensing, deep learning-based detection and segmentation, 3D pose estimation, and robotic actuation using a compact hybrid gripper. |
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Project Summer 2023 - Present Multi-modal classification of learning disabilities based on handwritten essays and transcripts using cluster computing and multi-GPU training. |
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Project Spring 2023 - Present Image acquisition, labeling, and training of state-of-the-art object detection models for automatic harvesting. |
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Project Fall 2022 – Spring 2023 Classifying COVID-19 severity using Chest X-Ray images and clinical data, developed in collaboration with Texas Children's Hospital. |
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Project 2021 Developing a deep Siamese network for lip-based person re-identification to enhance biometric security. |
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Project 2019 – 2021 Implemented an X-ray video-based CNN classifier for tire defect identification, significantly improving quality assessment. |
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Project 2021 Developed a highly accurate (98.2%) classification system for Jujube pricing using Matlab and Python, leveraging image processing techniques. |
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Representative papers are highlighted. |
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Abdollah Zakeri; Jiming Kang; Bikram Koirala; Raman Silwal; Venkatesh Balan; Weihang Zhu; Driss Benhaddoub; Fatima A. Merchant Computers and Electronics in Agriculture (COMPAG), 2025 |
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Abdollah Zakeri; Jiming Kang; Bikram Koirala; Venkatesh Balan; Weihang Zhu; Driss Benhaddoub; Fatima A. Merchant Computers and Electronics in Agriculture (COMPAG), 2025 |
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Koirala, B.; Abdollah Zakeri; Kang, J.; Kafle, A.; Balan, V.; Merchant, F.A.; Benhaddou, D.; Zhu, W. Appl. Sci. 2024, 14, 9229 |
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Koirala, B.; Shen, G.; Nguyen, H.C.; Kang, J.; Abdollah Zakeri; Balan, V.; Merchant, F.; Benhaddou, D.; Zhu, W. ASME 2024 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, 48th MR Conference |
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Koirala, B.; Kafle, A.; Nguyen, H.C.; Kang, J.; Abdollah Zakeri; Balan, V.; Merchant, F.; Benhaddou, D.; Zhu, W. Actuators 2024, 13, 287 |
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Vuong D. Nguyen; Samiha Mirza; Abdollah Zakeri; Ayush Gupta; Rahma Aloui; Khadija Khaldi; Pranav Mantini; Shishir Shah; Fatima Merchant CVPR 2024 Workshop |
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Abdollah Zakeri; Mulham Fawakherji; Jiming Kang; Bikram Koirala; Venkatesh Balan; Weihang Zhu; Driss Benhaddou; Fatima A. Merchant Under Review, Computers and Electronics in Agriculture |
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Hosseini, S.A.; Eshghi, A.; Mohammadi, S.; Abdollah Zakeri Under Review |
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Abdollah Zakeri; H. Hassanpour; M.H. Khosravi; A.M. Nourollah Under Review, IEEE Trans. on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science |
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Abdollah Zakeri; H. Hassanpour Published, 2021 |
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Abdollah Zakeri; R. Hedayati; M. Khedmati; M. Taghipour-Gorjikolaie ArXiv Preprint, 2021 |
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Abdollah Zakeri; B. Koirala; J. Kang; V. Balan; W. Zhu; D. Benhaddou; F. Merchant Preprints 2025 |
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This website's source code is adapted from Jon Barron's template. Much thanks! |