Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Timeline

1. 2006–2011

   RIT degree and Minnesota PhD

   He earns a bachelor's degree in computer science at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2006, studies philosophy alongside it, and receives an honorable mention in the Computing Research Association's 2006 Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award. In 2011, he completes a computer science PhD at the University of Minnesota, advised by Jaideep Srivastava, with a dissertation on computational trust in multiplayer online games.

2. 2011

   Detecting gold farmers in games

   In 2011, he coauthors the paper Illicit bits with Brian Keegan, Sophia Sullivan, Dmitri Williams, Jaideep Srivastava and Noshir Contractor; it analyzes the items traded by players later banned for gold farming and builds predictive models that identify deviant players. Papers from the gold-farming project win best paper awards in 2011 at the ACM Web Science Conference and at the Game Behind the Video Game conference at Rutgers University.

3. 2016

   Building Grandpabot

   In 2016, he finishes the first version of Grandpabot, a conversational simulation of a deceased person built from letters, writings and audio recordings, and keeps updating it afterward. The project ranks among the earliest examples of griefbots.

4. By 2019

   Principal data scientist at KenSci

   By 2019, he is a principal data scientist at KenSci, the healthcare AI company co-founded by his undergraduate mentor Ankur Teredesai, where he works to keep its models accountable, fair and responsible. He is also an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington Tacoma, and AI and Faith names him a Founding Expert in October 2019.

5. 2020

   Fairness in clinical machine learning

   In 2020, he coauthors the tutorial Fairness in Machine Learning for Healthcare at the ACM SIGKDD conference with Arpit Patel, Carly Eckert, Vikas Kumar and Ankur Teredesai. The team he leads creates fairMLHealth in 2020, an open-source toolkit for assessing bias in clinical models.

6. January 2025

   Rabbi Bot in the Times

   In January 2025, the New York Times profiles Rabbi Josh Fixler and the AI-generated sermons of Rabbi Bot, a system he helps create. The chatbot is trained on a Houston rabbi's sermons and writes a sermon delivered in the rabbi's cloned voice.

7. 2025

   Harborview fellow and UW Bothell

   In 2025, he is an affiliate assistant professor in the University of Washington Bothell's School of STEM and a research fellow in the Department of Surgery at Harborview Medical Center. He studies how machine learning applies in health care, including how AI can help determine who will survive among patients with severe and life-threatening conditions, and he leads research on AI surrogates that estimate the treatment preferences of incapacitated patients.

8. Since 2026

   Assistant professor at Baylor

   Coming from ten years of healthcare AI work in industry, including a role as Principal Data Scientist at Kaiser Permanente, he joins Baylor College of Medicine in 2026 as Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, focusing on artificial intelligence and data science. He is also part of ATLAS A.I., the interdisciplinary research initiative in Baylor's Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery.