Kazi Ashik Islam

PhD Researcher in Computer Science

University of Virginia

About Me

I am a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Virginia, working at the Biocomplexity Institute. My research focuses on developing computational tools for public policy and decision-making, particularly in the areas of large-scale disaster management and infrastructure development.

My work combines machine learning, optimization, and agent-based modeling to solve complex real-world problems. I have published in venues including PNAS, IJCAI, CIKM, and IEEE conferences, and have collaborated with institutions like Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Education

PhD in Computer Science August 2019 - Present
University of Virginia, School of Engineering and Applied Science

Research Focus: Computational tools for public policy and decision-making in large-scale disaster management and infrastructure development

MCS in Computer Science May 2023
University of Virginia, School of Engineering and Applied Science

GPA: 4.0 / 4.0

Coursework: Machine Learning, Graph Mining, Topics in Learning and Game Theory

BSc in Computer Science September 2017
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology

GPA: 3.86 / 4.0

Major: Artificial Intelligence

Work Experience

Graduate Research Assistant August 2019 - Present
Biocomplexity Institute, Charlottesville, VA, USA
  • Conducting research on complex real-world problems in large-scale disaster management and EV charging infrastructure development
  • Developing data-driven computational frameworks for policy and decision-making
  • Publishing in top-tier conferences and journals
PhD Research Intern June 2024 - May 2025
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA (Remote)
  • Developed framework using LLMs to automatically extract structured metadata from Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) documents
  • Contributed to public release of NEPATEC2.0 dataset
  • Developed benchmark dataset and evaluation framework to assess RAG systems in Catalysis domain
Software Engineer September 2017 - June 2019
Dingi Technologies Limited, Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • Designed and developed systems for live traffic prediction, vehicle tracking, location-based search, and navigation
  • Implemented backend functionalities including database design, data pipelines, and APIs
  • Deployed live APIs on AWS to serve web and mobile applications

Selected Publications

[1] CHARGE-MAP: An Integrated Framework to Study Multi-criteria EV Charging Infrastructure Expansion Problem
Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
Kazi Ashik Islam, Aparna Kishore, Rounak Meyur, Swapna Thorve, Da Qi Chen, H. Vincent Poor, and Madhav Marathe
[2] Towards High Resolution Probabilistic Coastal Inundation Forecasting from Sparse Observations
Under Review at AAAI-26, 2026
Developed masked conditional diffusion model achieving 62% performance improvement over state-of-the-art methods
[3] Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Coastal Inundation Forecasting
ACM SIGSPATIAL-25 (To be Published)
Demonstrated 64% improvement over baselines in coastal inundation prediction accuracy
[4] A Scalable Game-Theoretic Approach to Urban Evacuation Routing and Scheduling
IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 2024
Formulated strategic routing game and proved existence of pure Nash equilibria
[5] Simulation Assisted Optimization for Large-Scale Evacuation Planning with Congestion-Dependent Delays
IJCAI-23, 2023
Designed solution method utilizing Agent-based simulation and AI that outperforms state-of-the-art

View All Publications on Google Scholar

Technical Skills

Programming Languages

Python, C/C++, Java

ML Frameworks

PyTorch, TensorFlow

LLM Frameworks

LlamaIndex, LangChain, DSPy

Optimization

Gurobi

Database

PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch

GIS Tools

PostGIS, ArcGIS, QGIS

Web Development

Django

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS EC2, RDS, API Gateway, Bedrock

Honors & Awards

Carlos and Esther Farrar Fellowship Award
School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia (2023-2024)
Best Demonstration Paper Award
International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD), 2017
Dean's List Scholarship
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
University Merit List Scholarship
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology