Selected Delegate, ITU-T AI Capacity Building Workshop
Workshop Delegate at ITU-T AI Capacity Building Workshop, commissioned by ICT Division, Government of Bangladesh, New Delhi, India
CV
Profile
Policy technologist and data scientist with extensive experience in Bangladesh’s digital transformation ecosystem, including cybersecurity and data governance legal drafting, public-sector system design, and technical audit/oversight of national-scale digital services. Proven ability to operate in high-trust environments, translate international best practices into implementable controls, and coordinate multi-stakeholder delivery across government, development partners, and technical teams.
Core competencies
- Technical systems & data analysis: analysis and design of complex digital systems; data-driven problem solving using modern machine learning frameworks; experience across NLP, speech, vision, and biomedical imaging; emphasis on model evaluation, limitations, and responsible use.
- Research methods & reproducibility: experimental design; dataset creation and annotation protocols; quantitative and qualitative analysis; reproducible reporting and documentation; academic writing and collaborative research workflows using LATEX and version control.
- Governance, policy & institutions: policy and regulatory analysis for digital technologies; data governance and institutional design; translation of international standards and best practices into implementable public-sector mechanisms; understanding of accountability, transparency, and public value in tech deployment.
- Socio-technical systems analysis: evaluation of how technical systems interact with organizational, legal, and social contexts; assessment of trade-offs, risks, and incentives in large-scale public and private sector digital initiatives.
- Leadership & stakeholder engagement: leading and coordinating multidisciplinary teams; stakeholder consultation across government, academia, industry, and civil society; technical writing for non-technical audiences; production of decision-ready reports, policy briefs, and implementation roadmaps.
Professional experience
Policy Analyst, Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology Coordinator, ICT Division Adviser’s Office — Dhaka, Bangladesh - 2024 – Feb 2025
- Led and contributed to drafting national legal instruments including the Cyber Safety Law 2025, Personal Data Protection Law 2025, National Data Governance & Interoperability Authority (NDGIA) Law 2025, and Postal Service Law 2025.
- Restructured a USD 24M government AI project titled ‘Enhancement of Bangla Language in ICT’ and designed the project to accommodate native multimodal LLM, speech recognition support for major dialects and indigenous languages, and native GPU cloud infrastructure.
- Supported whole-of-government digital transformation initiatives (Land, BRTA, NBR, Commerce, Expatriates Welfare, Environment) by coordinating cross-agency planning and aligning operational delivery with governance and risk considerations.
- Spearheaded design and development coordination for police digital solutions including online and on-call General Diary via 333 Hotline IVR, online and on-call FIR, Incident Tracking System, and Joint Command Centre communication app.
- Conducted organization-wide information security assessments covering hardware, software, data assets, and operational processes using CIA-based risk analysis.
- Developed risk registers, threat models, and mitigation plans aligned with ISO/IEC 27001 and NIST-inspired controls.
- Reviewed security architecture and system configurations for citizen-facing government platforms; identified design flaws, trust-boundary issues, and access-control weaknesses.
- Produced decision-ready assessment reports, security improvement plans, and implementation roadmaps for senior government stakeholders.
- Chief Coordinator, ICT Whitepaper Taskforce, Government of Bangladesh — Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Mar 2025 – Nov 2025
- Coordinated a high-level diagnostic on ICT sector governance over a 15-year horizon under instruction from the Chief Advisor; produced analyses on governance practices, risks, and institutional weaknesses with an emphasis on accountability mechanisms.
- Conducted investigations into irregularities across government tenders, recruitment processes, and evaluation mechanisms; handled sensitive documents and recorded whistleblower testimonies with confidentiality and duty-of-care.
- National Consultant (Information Security), UNDP — Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Dec 2025 – Jun 2026
- Conducted comprehensive information security assessments to identify threats and vulnerabilities across hardware, software, and data assets; analyzed risks and proposed mitigation measures to protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA).
- Reviewed and strengthened security policies, standards, and procedures; developed updated security policy and control recommendations aligned with industry best practices.
- Reviewed system security architecture and configurations to detect design flaws and access/control weaknesses; assessed risk exposure and recommended actionable remediation measures.
- Conducted vulnerability scanning and penetration testing and produced a prioritized remediation roadmap to address critical findings.
- Delivered decision-ready outputs including an IT security assessment report, security improvement plan, and implementation roadmap in line with agreed UNDP deliverables and timelines.
- Consultant, National Consensus Commission, Government of Bangladesh — Dhaka, Bangladesh
- 2025
- Designed structured surveys for political parties and public consultations on major reform agendas; managed data collection and analysis and supported publication through reform.gov.bd.
- Developed content and information architecture for a public-facing portal to publish reform agendas and support transparency.
- Worked on public engagement for the 2026 referendum and led the development of the focal government portal www.gonovote.bd.
- Member, National AI Policy Steering Committee, ICT Division — Dhaka, Bangladesh
- 2025 – 2026
- Contributed to the formulation of Bangladesh’s National AI Policy (draft) (2026–2030), defining national vision, principles, and implementation pathways for ethical, human-centric, and innovation-driven AI adoption.
- Co-authored policy frameworks covering AI governance, data management and interoperability, risk classification, regulatory sandboxes, public-sector deployment, and institutional oversight mechanisms.
- Provided technical and research input across priority sectors including public service delivery, education and R&D, labour and employment, healthcare, agriculture, national security, and disaster risk reduction.
- Integrated international norms and best practices (OECD AI Principles, UNESCO AI Ethics, SDGs, and human-rights-based approaches) into nationally implementable regulatory and governance structures.
- Machine Learning Engineer (Contractual), Alexa Translations — Bangladesh
- Developed multilingual machine translation systems using machine learning.
- Assessed, developed, and deployed deep learning models for language translation.
- Built rule-based machine translation systems for various language pairs.
- Collaborated with multidisciplinary teams and coordinated research and deployment efforts.
- Expert, Project Niti, Google Research — Remote / Ontario, Canada
- Sept 2023 – Jan 2024
- Conducted adversarial data collection and red-teaming for Generative AI models to identify socio-cultural vulnerabilities and improve safety guardrails in regional languages.
- Curated high-sensitivity linguistic datasets across multiple safety domains to stress-test model alignment with localized ethical policies and safety frameworks.
- Provided expert socio-technical analysis on colloquialisms, regional slang, and idiomatic expressions to mitigate risks associated with adversarial prompts and harmful content generation.
- Developed comprehensive linguistic benchmarks and metadata to enhance the model’s grounding and performance within specific cultural and regional contexts.
- Graduate Research & Teaching Assistant, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) — Troy, NY, USA
- Sept 2021 – Sept 2023
- Conducted graduate-level research in biomedical imaging, with a focus on Cardiac CT and photon-counting CT, including data analysis and model development.
- Contributed to peer-reviewed research on medical imaging systems and algorithms, supporting experimental design, evaluation, and documentation.
- Supported undergraduate and graduate teaching activities, including lab sessions, grading, and academic mentoring.
- Collaborated with interdisciplinary research teams across engineering and medical imaging domains.
- VC Fellow, Lecturer, Brac University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering — Bangladesh
- Jan 2021 – Sept 2021
- Taught theory and lab classes for CSE 422 (Artificial Intelligence), MAT 215 (Complex Variables & Laplace Transformations), and MAT 330 (Numerical Analysis).
- Supervised research, supported assessment and grading, and provided student consultation and academic support.
- Machine Learning Expert (Government Consultant), EBLICT, ICT Division — Dhaka, Bangladesh
- May 2021 – Aug 2022
- Led machine-learning technology development for 16 public-facing government NLP services (ASR, TTS, grammar checker, machine translation, language modeling).
- Conducted technical audit/oversight for multiple government digital initiatives (cumulative portfolio value: USD 20M), reviewing deliverables and supporting governance and implementation discipline.
- Drafted Terms of Reference (ToR) for new projects and coordinated multidisciplinary teams across engineering and government stakeholders.
- Research Engineer, Mayalogy — Bangladesh
- Sept 2020 – May 2021
- Built AI-assisted healthcare systems and led annotation teams for NLP, computer vision, and romanized Bangla normalization.
- Research Engineer, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology — Bangladesh
- Nov 2018 – Aug 2020
- Developed deep learning biomedical data processing and teleradiology platforms, and researched sensor-agnostic medical systems.
- Coordinator, Bengali.AI — Bangladesh
- Mar 2018 – Present
- Launched large-scale Bengali language dataset and research competitions, crowdsourced speech and sign language corpora, and led community-driven AI research initiatives.
Education
- B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE)
- Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)
- Relevant coursework: Digital Signal Processing, Random Signal Processing, Communication Theory, Control Theory, Biomedical Instrumentation
Publications
Recent publications cover applied AI, data governance, NLP, speech and biomedical imaging research. They document both academic outputs and practical dataset contributions that support policy, security, and national technology initiatives. Selected publications with 300+ citations, focusing on NLP, Biomedical AI, and Low-resource AI.
Publications
- A pipeline for lung tumor detection and segmentation from CT scans using dilated convolutional neural networks, Shahruk Hossain, Suhail Najeeb, Asif Shahriyar Sushmit, … (IEEE ICASSP, 2019)
- End-to-end sleep staging with raw single channel EEG using deep residual convnets, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Asif Sushmit, Taufiq Hasan, Mohammed Imamul Hassan Bhuiyan (IEEE EMBS BHI, 2019)
- Bengali Common Voice speech dataset for automatic speech recognition, Samiul Alam, Asif Sushmit, Zaowad Abdullah, … (arXiv, 2022)
- A Large Multi-Target Dataset of Common Bengali Handwritten Graphemes, Samiul Alam, Tahsin Reasat, Asif Sushmit, … (arXiv, 2020)
- X-ray image compression using convolutional recurrent neural networks, Asif Sushmit, Shakib Uz Zaman, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Taufiq Hasan, Mohammed Imamul Hassan Bhuiyan (IEEE EMBS BHI, 2019)
- Cardiac CT motion artifact grading via semi-automatic labeling and vessel tracking using synthetic image-augmented training data, Yongshun Xu, Asif Sushmit, Qing Lyu, …, Hengyong Yu (Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, 2022)
- Badlad: A large multi-domain Bengali document layout analysis dataset, Md Istiak Hossain Shihab, Md Rakibul Hasan, …, Asif Sushmit (ICDAR, 2023)
- OOD-Speech: A Large Bengali Speech Recognition Dataset for Out-of-Distribution Benchmarking, Souhardya Saha Dip, Samiul Alam, Nazia Tasnim, …, Asif Sushmit (Interspeech, 2023)
- Multi-label classification of common Bengali handwritten graphemes: Dataset and challenge, Samiul Alam, Tahsin Reasat, Asif Sushmit, … (arXiv, 2020)
- Design of a gesture controlled robotic gripper arm using neural networks, Asif Sushmit, Fariha Musharrat Haque, Md Shahriar, …, MA Rashid Sarkar (IEEE ICPCSI, 2017)
- Design of a voice controlled robotic gripper arm using neural networks, Fariha Musharrat Haque, Asif Sushmit, MA Rashid Sarkar (IEEE ICECDS, 2017)
- Unicode normalization and grapheme parsing of Indic languages, Md Nazmuddoha Ansary, Quazi Adibur Rahman Adib, …, Asif Sushmit (LREC-COLING, 2023)
- Mapping violence: Developing an extensive framework to build a Bangla sectarian expression dataset from social media interactions, Nazia Tasnim, Sujan Sen Gupta, …, Asif Sushmit (arXiv, 2023)
- bbocr: An open-source multi-domain OCR pipeline for Bengali documents, Imam Mohammad Zulkarnain, Shayekh Bin Islam, …, Asif Sushmit (arXiv, 2022)
- Abugida normalizer and parser for Unicode texts, Md Nazmuddoha Ansary, Quazi Adibur Rahman Adib, …, Asif Sushmit (arXiv, 2025)
- A data generation pipeline for cardiac vessel segmentation and motion artifact grading, Asif Sushmit, Yongshun Xu, Olivia Mariani, …, Hengyong Yu (SPIE Developments in X-Ray Tomography, 2024)
- RegSpeech12: A regional corpus of Bengali spontaneous speech across dialects, Md Rezuwan Hassan, Azmol Hossain, …, Asif Sushmit (arXiv, 2024)
- Towards Santali linguistic inclusion: Building the first Santali-to-English translation model using mT5 Transformer and data augmentation, Syed Mohammed Mostaque Billah, Ateya Ahmed Subarna, …, Asif Sushmit (arXiv, 2024)
- TEAM-Atreides at SemEval-2022 Task 11: On leveraging data augmentation and ensemble to recognize complex Named Entities in Bangla, Nazia Tasnim, Md Istiak Shihab, Asif Sushmit, Steven Bethard, Farig Sadeque (SemEval, 2022)
- Segcodenet: Color-coded segmentation masks for activity detection from wearable cameras, Asif Sushmit, Partho Ghosh, Md Abrar Istiak, Nayeeb Rashid, Ahsan Habib Akash, Taufiq Hasan (arXiv, 2020)
- Data efficient contrastive learning in histopathology using active sampling, Tahsin Reasat, Asif Sushmit, David S. Smith (Machine Learning, 2024)
- IPA transcription of Bengali texts, Kanij Fatema, Fazle Dawood Haider, …, Asif Sushmit (arXiv, 2024)
- Bornil: An open-source sign language data crowdsourcing platform for AI enabled dialect-agnostic communication, Shahriar Elahi Dhruvo, Mohammad Akhlaqur Rahman, …, Asif Sushmit (arXiv, 2023)
- Privacy-aware activity classification from first person office videos, Partho Ghosh, Md Abrar Istiak, Nayeeb Rashid, Ahsan Habib Akash, …, Asif Sushmit, Taufiq Hasan (IEEE HPEC, 2020)
- BanglaDocAtlas: A Multi-Class Annotated Dataset for Complex Bangla Document Layout Analysis, Md Safayat Hossain, Jannatul Ferdous, …, Asif Sushmit (arXiv, 2025)
Talks
Recent talks focus on national AI policy, information security, digital transformation, and regional language technology. They reflect engagement with both technical and policy audiences across government, academia, and civil society.
Host, National ASR Hackathon
Hackathon Host at Bengali.AI and BUET CSE, Bangladesh
Kaggle Best Community Competition Award
Award at Kaggle, Bangladesh
Launch of the National Grammatical Error Detection (GED) Competition
Competition Launch at Kaggle, Bangladesh
Public Lecture: Demystifying AI
Public Lecture at Reading Club Trust, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Guest Lecture: Introduction to Data Science
Guest Lecture at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sylhet, Bangladesh
Bengali Language Technology Roadmap
Conference Talk at ICBBDB 2021, UIU Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Runner-up, Call for Nation Covid Accelerator
Competition Achievement at Call for Nation Covid Accelerator, ICT Division, Government of Bangladesh, Bangladesh
NVIDIA Titan Xp GPU Grant
Research Grant at NVIDIA GPU Grant Program, Remote
Runner-up, IEEE VIP CUP 2019
Competition Achievement at IEEE VIP CUP, Bangladesh
Champion, IEEE VIP CUP 2018
Competition Achievement at IEEE VIP CUP, Greece
Public Lecture: Workshop on Basic Matlab and Image Processing
Public Lecture at BUET, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Workshop: Matlab and Image Processing
Workshop at BUET University Science Club, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Runner-up, Bangladesh National Science Olympiad
Academic Achievement at Bangladesh National Science Olympiad, Bangladesh
Runner-up, Bangladesh Physics Olympiad
Academic Achievement at Bangladesh Physics Olympiad, Bangladesh
Champion, National Power Energy Hackathon 2017
Competition Achievement at National Power Energy Hackathon, Bangladesh
Champion, National Robotics Competition 2017
Competition Achievement at National Robotics Competition, Bangladesh
Activities
Professional landmarks, achievements, and certifications include policy engagement, research leadership, competition results, speaking engagements, and education initiatives. See the full list on the Activities page.
Teaching
Teaching experience includes undergraduate and graduate instruction in AI, numerical analysis, and engineering mathematics, along with research supervision and academic mentoring. These activities support the translation of technical research into practical learning for students in Bangladesh and beyond.