Kazi Ashik Islam

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

About Me

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where I design and formalize sub-quadratic attention mechanisms with structured hierarchical memory, targeting efficient training and sublinear-memory decoding.

I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, where my research focused on computational tools for public policy and decision-making, particularly in 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 AAAI, PNAS, IJCAI, CIKM, and IEEE conferences, and have collaborated with institutions like Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Recent News

Jul 2026
New publication: "REVI-twin: an integrated AI-driven methodology for creating digital twin of residential electric vehicle infrastructure", npj Sustainable Mobility and Transport. Read the paper
Apr 2026
Started as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working on sub-quadratic attention mechanisms with structured hierarchical memory.
Mar 2026
Our paper "Towards High Resolution Probabilistic Coastal Inundation Forecasting from Sparse Observations" was published at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26). Paper · Code

Education

PhD in Computer Science August 2019 - December 2025
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

Postdoctoral Research Associate April 2026 - To Date
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
  • Designing and formalizing sub-quadratic attention mechanisms with structured hierarchical memory, targeting efficient training and sublinear-memory decoding
Graduate Research Assistant August 2019 - April 2026
Biocomplexity Institute, Charlottesville, VA, USA
  • Conducted research on designing computational frameworks that leverage simulation, optimization, and data-driven techniques to enhance urban resilience
  • Developed data-driven computational frameworks for policy and decision-making in large-scale disaster management and EV charging infrastructure development
  • Published in top-tier conferences and journals
Graduate Teaching Assistant August 2020 - May 2024
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
  • Served as Teaching Assistant for four semesters across three courses: Algorithmic Economics (CS 4501), Cloud Computing (CS 4740), and Discrete Mathematics (CS 2102)
  • Provided academic support through office hours, fostering collaborative learning environments
  • Assisted students in understanding complex concepts in algorithmic economics, cloud computing, and discrete mathematics
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] Towards High Resolution Probabilistic Coastal Inundation Forecasting from Sparse Observations
Proceedings of the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Vol. 40, No. 45, pp. 38607-38615, 2026
Developed a masked conditional diffusion model, trained on physics-based hydrodynamic simulations, that performs real-time coastal inundation forecasting from sparse sensor observations, achieving up to 62% improvement over state-of-the-art methods at 95% sparsity levels
[2] CHARGE-MAP: An Integrated Framework to Study Multi-criteria EV Charging Infrastructure Expansion Problem
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 122.51 (2025): e2514184122
Kazi Ashik Islam, Aparna Kishore, Rounak Meyur, Swapna Thorve, Da Qi Chen, H. Vincent Poor, and Madhav Marathe
[3] Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Coastal Inundation Forecasting
Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL), pp. 973-976, 2025
Demonstrated up to 64% improvement over state-of-the-art baselines in coastal inundation prediction accuracy
[4] A Scalable Game-Theoretic Approach to Urban Evacuation Routing and Scheduling
Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), pp. 1775-1784, 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
Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-23), pp. 5359-5367, 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

Professional Service

Full Record on ORCID