About Me

Hello! I’m Hossein Goli, a Last-year undergraduate student in Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology (the best university in Iran, according to QS ranking 2025 ).

I generally relish mathematically inspired fields, and as such, I am excited about Machine Learning, in particular Reinforcement Learning, Optimization and Computer Vision. Because of my roots in Physics, One of the things i most enjoy is to combine beautiful mathematical concepts coming from physics and the perespectives of a physicist into Machine Learning Algorithms. I enjoy both the theoretical and practical side of Machine Learning, as the enjoyment of seeing your algorithm work is like no other.

I am searching for captivating projects that will both challenge me and allow me to explore, with the thrill of experimenting and learning through trial and error. If you have any suggestions or would like to collaborate on a project, please feel free to reach out to me.

Education

Sharif University Of Technology, Tehran, Iran
2020 - Now
B.Sc. Computer Engineering
GPA: 19.8 out of 20.0
Rank 2 out of 193 students
Diploma of Mathematics and Physics
2016 - 2020
Allame Helli NODET (SAMPAD) High School

Honors and Awards

National Physics Olympiad Silver Medalist Young Scholars Club
Jun 2019 - Sep 2019
In Iran, a competition consisting of three rounds is held annually, in which more than 10,000 participants are tested on their theoretical and practical knowledge of physics. Following the third and final round, only 40 participants are selected to attend the Physics Olympiad Summer School, where they have the opportunity to explore the subject in greater depth during the summer. Fortunately, I was selected as one of the 40 participants, and after several midterm and final exams, I was awarded a silver medal.
Ranked 32 at the Nationwide University Entrance Exams
June, 2013 - May, 2015
Ranked 32nd in the National University Entrance Exam on Mathematics (Konkour) among more than 150,000 students nationwide. (Top 0.02%)
Summer 2024 - Max Planck Institute
CMMRS 2024 is a Pre-Doctoral School on Computer Science organized by Cornell University, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, and University of Maryland, College Park. I was among about 80 talented students from all over the world who were selected to participate in this school.
View Certificate

Experiences

Research Experience

Certified Adversarial Robustness Thumbnail
Certified Adversarial Robustness via Partition-based Randomized Smoothing

In collaboration with Prof. Farzan Farnia, We proposed a new method for the Certified Robustness Problem that leverages the spatial correlation of image pixels using SuperPixel Algorithms from Computer Vision literature, such as SLIC SuperPixels. Our method greatly improves the visibility of the image and reduces the effective noise by a factor proportional to the square-root of the average super pixel size. The paper is currently available on arXiv and we plan to complete some of our proofs and submit it soon.

Read on arXiv
Research Project 2 Thumbnail
Off Policy Evalution using Generative Models

Under the Supervision of Prof. Florian Shkurti, We proposed a novel method for Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) using generative models as a substitute for dynamic models. This approach focuses on Energy-Based Models (EBMs), particularly Diffusion Models, to generate realistic trajectories. I am currently testing and evaluating the method in high-dimensional environments, such as Mujoco.

Research Project 2 Thumbnail
Detecting Viral Social Events with Deep Survival Analysis in Complex Networks

In this Project We Developed a framework for early detection of viral events in a complex network using statistical methods such as survival analysis. To learn a good survival function we proposed using RNN's on the time series data. We evaluted our work on multiple datasets including Twitter, Weibo and Digg.

Read on arXiv

Coursework Projects

Computer Vision Course Project Thumbnail
Computer Vision Course Project

Developed a graph-based image segmentation algorithm using superpixels to group similar pixels by spatial and color features. After constructing the graph, Disjoint Set Union (DSU) iteratively merges vertices until final segmentation. Leveraging SLIC superpixels, a k-means variant, this method enhances robustness without requiring adversarial training. In the second part of the project, we implemented Tiny-NeRF, a simplified version of the famous NeRF paper.

GitHub Repository Project Report
Image Captioning Using LSTM Thumbnail
Image Captioning Using LSTM

In this mini project, I used an LSTM-based encoder-decoder architecture for image captioning on the Flickr8k dataset. Keras was used as the main framework for designing the architecture, while PyTorch’s "bert-base-uncased" model was utilized to measure the similarity between true and predicted captions.

GitHub Repository
Kafka from Scratch Project Thumbnail
System Analysis Design Project - Kafka from Scratch

In this project, we designed a fully dockerized, distributed message queue system from scratch, similar to Kafka. The project involved building and configuring a fault-tolerant, scalable messaging system using Docker containers, allowing message passing across distributed nodes.

GitHub Repository
Kafka from Scratch Project Thumbnail
Advanced Programming Project - YuGiOh Game

In this project, we designed the famous trading card game, YuGiOh, from scratch, utilizing various design patterns such as Singleton, Factory, Observer, and more. The programming language used was Java. The project was divided into three phases: implementing the core game logic, developing the graphical user interface, and adding network capabilities to allow peer-to-peer gameplay.

GitHub Repository Watch Trailer

Teaching Experience and Community Involvement

Teaching Assistant at Sharif University of Technology

  • Machine Learning (Graduate), Spring 2024, Prof. Fatemeh SeyedSalehi — Head Teaching Assistant
  • Machine Learning (Graduate), Fall 2023, Prof. Abolfazl Motahari — Theoretical Head Teaching Assistant
  • Probability and Statistics, Spring 2023, Prof. Ali Sharifi Zarchi — Head of Midterm Exam
  • Linear Algebra, Fall 2022, Prof. Hamid R. Rabiee — Recitation Class and Homeworks
  • Advanced Programming, Spring 2022, Prof. Amin Fazli — Project Design Team

Physics Olympiad Teacher

Prepared students to participate in the Physics Olympiad, teaching multiple subjects such as Multivariate Calculus, Electromagnetics, and Newtonian Mechanics.

Rasta Summer School - Game Theory Mentor

We organized and led a workshop for high school students, introducing fundamental concepts of game theory in an engaging manner. The workshop was divided into three sections: Market Sharing, Braess’s Paradox, and the Development of Trust. My primary responsibility was the Development of Trust Section.

Scientific Staff of Sharif AI-Challenge

As a scientific staff member, I was involved with the design and implementation of the scientific part of the challenge.

Professional Skills

Python
R
Java
Pytorch
Tensorflow Keras
C/C++

Hobbies

Outside of academia, I enjoy engaging in activities that help me relax and find inspiration for my work. Here are some of my hobbies:

  • History Exploring - I enjoy reading history, especially from the Sengoku era (Japan) and the Three Kingdoms (China). I fantasize about different paths that history could have unfolded and write and draw some paintings from those eras
  • Gardening and Flowering - I used to enjoy gardening and taking care of flowers. I plan to take up this hobby again in the near future.
  • Mexican Peppers from my Garden

    Some of my mexican Peppers