Hi, I'm Ziya 👋
I study AI and Computer Science at Edinburgh and build AI systems for finance, computational biology, and developer workflows.
ZM

About

I’m an AI and Computer Science student at the University of Edinburgh, supported by the Azerbaijani State Scholarship. I currently work as an AI Engineer Intern at ABB Invest and collaborate with Houston Lab on computational drug-discovery tooling. I’m especially interested in AI for biology, developer systems, HCI, and cognitive AI.

Work Experience

A

AI Engineer Intern
Baku, Azerbaijan
2026 - Present

Building a local-first Azerbaijani RAG API and embeddable support widget over public investment information, with cited answers, refusal and handoff controls, evaluation, and deployment safeguards.

M

Software Developer Intern
Baku, Azerbaijan
June 2024 - September 2024

Worked on production features and REST APIs in C# ASP.NET MVC. I also wrote integration tests, helped with CI checks, documented issues, and got used to the everyday rhythm of code reviews and GitLab workflows.

Research Experience

H

Research Collaborator · School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
July 2026 - Present
  • Building the web platform and distributed execution layer that turns a command-line ligand-preparation and virtual-screening pipeline into a public research tool, as an open alternative to parts of the proprietary LigPrep suite.
  • Designing the multi-server worker architecture: job distribution across compute nodes, database-backed status tracking, shared storage, retry logic, deployment, and monitoring.
  • Working on lab compute infrastructure over VPN/SSH; listed as a lab collaborator and designated co-author on the planned publication of the toolkit.

Education

U

BSc (Hons) Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science
2025 - 2029

Current focus: AI, cognitive science, functional programming, databases, algorithms, data structures, and linear algebra.

Awards

F

Republic of Azerbaijan — Ministry of Science and Education
2025 - 2029

A national scholarship from Azerbaijan that covers my studies and living costs at the University of Edinburgh.

B

Ministry of Science and Education, Republic of Azerbaijan
2023

Earned a bronze medal in Azerbaijan’s 2023 National Olympiad in Informatics.

Skills

Python
TypeScript/JavaScript
SQL
C++
Java
C#
Bash
FastAPI
Flask
Node.js
PostgreSQL
Docker
Linux
Git
CI/CD
Kubernetes
PyTorch
TensorFlow
NumPy
Pandas
COBRApy
Biopython
DIAMOND
Projects

Things I have been building

A few projects I built while learning, testing ideas, and working with teams. They focus on computational biology, applied AI, developer tools, and HCI.

8 projects here
6,000+ PyPI downloads
2 hackathons

AI for Bio

3
gemiz

gemiz

An alpha FASTA-to-SBML toolkit for bacterial genome-scale metabolic reconstruction, combining pyrodigal gene calling, MMseqs2 reaction scoring, COBRApy/HiGHS model assembly, and inspectable evidence and quality-control artifacts.

FASTA to SBML
Evidence + QC artifacts
Reproducible benchmarks
Python
pyrodigal
MMseqs2
COBRApy
HiGHS
SBML
library-prep-pipeline

library-prep-pipeline

A controlled-alpha platform for preparing large molecular libraries for virtual screening. PostgreSQL owns job state, NATS JetStream queues the work, and each RDKit/nvMolKit chemistry job runs in a bounded offline container on one approved GPU host.

PostgreSQL source of truth
JetStream leases + fencing
Bounded GPU sandbox
Go
Python
Next.js
PostgreSQL
NATS JetStream
SeaweedFS/S3
Docker
RDKit
nvMolKit
myco-optima

myco-optima

A fermentation planning tool from Edinburgh BioHackathon 2026. It uses GEMs and FBA/FVA to help compare media choices for four fungi, then turns a large design-of-experiments table into a smaller set of runs.

FBA/FVA media design
4 fungal species
81 to 15 conditions
Python
COBRApy
Streamlit
Anthropic API
FBA/FVA

Applied AI

2
whisper-az

whisper-az

A reproducible Azerbaijani speech-recognition benchmark and LoRA fine-tuning pipeline for Whisper. A 13M-parameter adapter reduced FLEURS WER from 51.7% to 35.0%, close to full Whisper Medium at 34.3%.

35.0% FLEURS WER
13M trainable parameters
51 MB LoRA adapter
Python
PyTorch
Transformers
PEFT/LoRA
Hugging Face
Whisper
Social Media Moderation

Social Media Moderation

VM-ready moderation microservices for posts, comments, usernames, and images. The system combines OpenAI-based classification with deterministic policies, OCR, and perceptual-image matching behind one documented REST API.

3 Spring Boot services
Text + image moderation
Hardened Docker deployment
Java 21
Spring Boot
OpenAI API
PostgreSQL
Flyway
Docker Compose
Tesseract OCR
PDQ Hashing
OpenAPI

Developer Tools

1
ytmusic-player

ytmusic-player

A cross-platform YouTube Music terminal player for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with search, keyboard-first playback, playlists, downloads, and remote CLI controls.

Cross-platform npm binaries
mpv + yt-dlp playback
Local playlists, no telemetry
TypeScript
Bun
mpv
yt-dlp
CLI/TUI

Cognitive Science & HCI

1

CogniCart

A virtual supermarket experiment for cognitive science. It looks at planning, working memory, inhibition, and flexibility, with eye tracking and behaviour logs built in.

Unity simulation
Eye-tracking pipeline
Behavioral logging
Unity
C#
WebGazer
Behavioral Logging
HCI

Open Source

1

Open-Source Python Libraries

Small Python packages I published while learning by building. Together they have 6,000+ downloads, including a Central Bank of Azerbaijan exchange-rate client, an Azerbaijani number-to-words converter, and a few cleaned datasets on Hugging Face.

6,000+ downloads
PyPI packages
Hugging Face datasets
Python
PyPI
Hugging Face
NLP
Open Source
Hackathons

Building under time pressure

Hackathons are a good way to find out whether an idea works outside your notes. These are the recent ones.

  • A

    AI Engine Hackathon

    Scotland, UK

    Built two projects here: circuit breaker for checking risky agent actions before they run, and mcpforge for turning a repo into an MCP server more quickly.
  • E

    Edinburgh BioHackathon 2026

    Edinburgh, UK

    Worked on the Pacifico Biolabs track. I built myco-optima, a GEM-based tool for narrowing down media choices in fungal fermentation experiments.

Volunteer

S

Head Coordinator
January 2024 - June 2025

Helped run peer mentoring and school technology activities for 200+ students.

Contact

Say hi

If you want to talk about a project, a paper, or just something interesting, message me on Signal or send me an email and I'll reply when I can.