Biography

Hello, and thank you for visiting. I’m a Senior Applied AI Scientist at Manulife, where I work as an internal Forward Deployed Engineer — sitting close to the business and closer to the metal — building agentic AI products tied to real business outcomes.

Previously, I owned RLOps from thought to production at Prem Labs for their agent finetuning platform, now live on AWS Marketplace. I’m an early contributor to Hugging Face’s trl library, the most widely used LLM finetuning library in the world.

I completed my Master in Applied Science from Queen’s University under the supervision of Dr. Ali Etemad. My research on Deepfake Detection was partially funded by the Vector Institute Scholarship in AI. Published in NeurIPS and TMLR. Reviewer at NeurIPS and ICASSP 2026. Listen to this podcast to know more.

In the 5pm–9am part of my life, I advise and help traditional businesses become AI-ready.

If you’d like to discuss something or collaborate, please don’t hesitate to reach out at sdas[DOT]codes[AT]gmail[DOT]com.