Md Fokhrul Islam
PhD Student & RA · School of Data Science, UVA
UVA SDS / UVA CDT / fokhrul.rmedu@gmail.com
I am a Data Science PhD student at the University of Virginia, advised by Professor Heman Shakeri. I work on machine learning for complex, safety-critical systems — healthcare technologies, robots acting in the physical world, and the societal systems they touch.
The question that drives my research: how do we build AI systems that are genuinely intelligent, rather than just well-trained? Most of today's models get their performance from enormous labeled datasets, but the systems I care about rarely have that luxury — and there, the cost of a mistake is not a benchmark point but more than that. I want models that adapt quickly, generalize to situations they have never seen, and come with guarantees: no matter how unfamiliar the situation.
I am working toward this along three threads:
- Learning with few or no labels — exploiting the geometry of high-dimensional representation spaces so that models can recognize and reason about things they were never trained on.
- Safety by design — combining control theory with learned models, so that closed-loop systems like the artificial pancreas can adapt to each patient while provably avoiding harmful states.
- Intelligence as adaptation — I find the world-model line of thinking compelling: self-supervised predictive representations and planning as optimization, with safety constraints built into the objective. Less a description of where my research sits than a compass for where it is headed.
Before UVA I completed my MSc and BSc in Robotics & Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Dhaka, where I worked with Professor Sejuti Rahman & Professor Shafin Rahman.
news
selected publications
latest posts
- Jun 2026 Curvature Tensors and the Geometric Architecture of Non-Euclidean Manifolds
- Apr 2025 Welcome to my blog — what I'll be writing about