hi, I'm Muhiim.
I grew up in Somalilandan unrecognized country in the Horn of Africa — a country most maps leave blank. At eleven, I secretly took an entrance exam for a boarding school without telling my parents. I passed. That one decision opened every door that followed.
Those doors led to Brown University, where I finished both a bachelor's and master's in computer science. My work focuses on AI and machine learning — building models that are more transparent, more equitable, and useful in places that usually get left out of the conversation. I care especially about vision-language understanding and making AI safer.
I also think about Somaliland a lot. Seventy percent of its youth are unemployed. I want to help change that — through technology, and someday through an all-female gym where women can discover what their bodies can do.
My mom named me Muhiimmuhiim — important, in Somali. I'm still figuring out what that means.
Currently looking for roles in AI/ML research and engineering.
When I'm not coding: learning calisthenics, playing pickup soccer.
Work
Research and projects, roughly in order of what I'm proudest of.
Research
DRIVE — Dynamic Relation Inference via Verb Embeddings
A new method for improving how vision-language models understand relationships between objects in images. Built CROCO, a refined dataset from COCO that distinguishes static from dynamic visual relationships, and designed a contrastive loss function that outperforms existing approaches on the task.
Projects
Cryptographic Voting for Multiple Candidates
Secure voting system for k-of-t elections using additively homomorphic ElGamal encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, blind RSA signatures, and threshold decryption. End-to-end verifiable while preserving ballot secrecy.
BERT Question-Answering System
Fine-tuned BERT for extractive QA on the Natural Questions benchmark. Custom loss functions and preprocessing brought competitive F1 (53.8%) without architectural changes.
Reddit Depression Detection
ML pipeline to detect depression signals in Reddit posts, combining LDA topic modeling and RoBERTa embeddings as features for random forest classifiers.
Craigslist Price Predictor
Multimodal price prediction combining VGG16 image features and spaCy text embeddings with gradient boosting. Handles both visual and textual listing data.
Writing
Essays on things I'm learning, thinking about, and trying to figure out.
Nothing here yet. I write when something feels important enough to slow down for — when I've lived with an idea long enough that writing it down might actually help someone else. Check back.