Waleed Ahmed

Computing Science master's student in the Faculty of Applied Sciences

Tell us a little about yourself, including what inspires you to learn and continue in your chosen field

I am a graduate student in computing science at SFU. I did my undergraduate degree in Software Engineering at the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan’s top-ranked university, and I first came to Canada as a research intern at Dalhousie before later spending time at Huawei. What pulls me to this field is simple. In this fourth industrial revolution, AI is the thing every other field is building on top of. Doctors, lawyers, farmers and governments are all becoming users of it, and comparatively few people are makers of it. That is the side I want to be on. The systems we are experimenting with in a lab this year are the ones ordinary people will depend on in a few years, which makes this a strange and serious moment to be doing this work. I also spend time on the policy side of AI, because how these systems get used ends up mattering as much as how they get built.

Why did you choose to come to SFU?

That first research stay in Canada is what made graduate school here go from an idea to a plan. When I started looking seriously at universities, SFU kept coming out ahead: consistently well ranked, genuinely research-intensive, and sitting in Vancouver, which has a real AI industry around it and winters that are mild by Canadian standards. The deciding factor was Professor Oliver Schulte. I wanted a supervisor who would let me chase a question rather than hand me one, and that is exactly what I got. Everything else made the decision comfortable, but that part made it easy.

How would you describe your research or your program to a family member?

Imagine teaching someone to make good decisions by having them read thousands of stories about choices other people made, the good ones and the bad ones, and then asking them to write the next chapter themselves. That is roughly what the models I work on do. My program is a thesis-based master’s, which means most of my time is not spent in classrooms. It is spent reading what other researchers have tried, arguing with my supervisor about what is missing, and running experiments that fail more often than they work. The failures are the job, not an interruption to it.

What three (3) keywords would you use to describe your research?

Reinforcement Learning, Agentic AI, Decision-Making

How have your courses, RA-ships, TA-ships, or non-academic school experiences contributed to your academic and/or professional development?

I am a teaching assistant for a course of roughly 200 students, which involves far more than explaining code. Invigilating, marking at that scale and answering the same concept five different ways for five different people has taught me patience and precision that research alone would not have. Outside of academics, I sit on the executive team of SFU’s Pakistan Student Association. I have always tried to build a well-rounded life rather than a narrow one, and SFU’s ecosystem has made that easier rather than harder: research on one side, community and entrepreneurship on the other. The clearest example is the summer I spent representing SFU back home at Pakistan’s Federal Ministry of Planning, where I worked on national AI strategy and sat in meetings at the highest levels of government (Once with the Prime Minister). Nothing in my coursework prepared me for that room, and nothing has been more useful since.

Have you been the recipient of any major or donor-funded awards? If so, please tell us which ones and a little about how the awards have impacted your studies and/or research

I am a recipient of SFU’s Graduate Fellowship, which has let me focus on my research full time rather than splitting my attention elsewhere.

What have been the most valuable lessons you've learned along your graduate student journey (or in becoming a graduate student)?

That showing up is most of it. SFU runs an enormous number of things every semester, academic and otherwise, and the students who get the most out of this place are simply the ones who keep turning up. Not every event pays off immediately. Almost all of them pay off eventually, usually through a person you met rather than a thing you learned. The second lesson is harder won. I came close to leaving this program in my first term after falling ill and going home to Pakistan. Coming back was a decision I had to make deliberately, and I came back far more determined than I left. I am glad I did.

How do you approach networking and building connections in and outside of your academic community?

Not by collecting contacts. My approach is to read what someone is actually working on first, then reach out with a real question about their approach and some honest sense of where our work overlaps. Everyone building something has impact in some corner of the world, and finding that corner is usually more interesting than whatever I came to say. I keep an active LinkedIn presence for exactly this reason, and most of the good things that have happened to me started there. The other half is applying for things. I was recently selected as one of around 30 young professionals from across Canada for an AI standards workshop in Montreal, held alongside the ISO/IEC SC 42 committee. I applied to a lot of things that said no before that one said yes. Be proactive, apply widely, and do not let the rejections become a reason to stop.

What are some tips for balancing your academic and personal life?

Put it on a calendar. Decide the maximum you can realistically give to academics, give it properly, and then let the rest be yours without guilt. The logic runs one way: your health and your personal life hold up your academic work, not the other way round. People who sacrifice the first for the second end up losing both. And use where you live. British Columbia is absurdly beautiful, and Burnaby Mountain is right outside the building. Walk down it, watch the sunset from campus, get out into the trees. Some of my best thinking has happened when I was not trying to think at all.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

I speak four languages and I am still waiting for the day that proves useful in a computing science seminar. When I am not in the lab I am usually thinking about how countries that are not building frontier AI models should position themselves anyway, or helping organize something for the Pakistani student community here. If any of that overlaps with what you are working on, I would genuinely like to hear about it.

Contact Waleed:waa18@sfu.ca

Additional Links

• LinkedIn