Issa Ahmed

I build autonomous robots, applied ML and AI systems, and full-stack tools.

Everything here is something I designed, built, and shipped.

Live demos: 4run live in
your browser
Focus: Robotics · Applied ML & AI · Full-stack
Status: Toronto · open to new-grad roles

Projects

Six projects, five I designed and built, one I fought for: two autonomous robots, an offline-RL agent, two clinical ML tools, and a federal advocacy campaign. Open any sheet for the full story.

The RECLAIM robot on the capstone showcase floor: drive base, sensor mast, and 4-DOF sorting arm

SHT 01Robotics · ROS2 · Computer Vision

Open sheet: RECLAIM: Autonomous Waste-Sorting Robot

As builtLive

The assistive-navigation robot on its taped test course, red-tape waypoint markers on a white foam-board floor

SHT 02Robotics · ROS2 · Nav2 · Computer Vision

Open sheet: Assistive Navigation Robot

As builtLive

Cover of The Journal of Arthroplasty: the 2026 issue featuring the peer-reviewed pain-prediction paper

SHT 03Clinical ML · Published

Open sheet: Predicting Pain After Total Hip Arthroplasty

Published

Court-zone heatmaps of learned shoot probability for the DQN and Dueling DQN agents: high near the basket, suppressed in mid-range

SHT 04Reinforcement learning

Open sheet: NBA Shot Selection: Offline RL

Audited & regroundedLive

SHT 05Clinical ML

Open sheet: Glenoid Morphology Classifier

Live

Toronto Star · Op-ed · Sole author

Grounded: what it’s like to be a No Fly List kid

SHT 06Advocacy · Policy

Open sheet: No Fly List Kids: Federal Advocacy

Ongoing

View all six

Design philosophy

I'm a mechatronics generalist: happiest at the seams where hardware, software, and ML meet, and comfortable moving between them and the people who aren't engineers. A few habits I keep coming back to:

01
Integrate across subsystems
My best work is where separate parts become one system: perception, control, firmware, and the arm on RECLAIM; a vendor ROS2 stack and my own nodes on the wheelchair. Mechatronics taught me to work across the seams, not stay in one lane.
RECLAIM · the full stack
02
Translate between technical and non-technical
I was the only engineer among the MDs and PhDs on a published clinical paper, and at 16 I wrote a Toronto Star op-ed and did national interviews about a security-list failure. I can make a system legible to the people who have to act on it.
THA · the only engineer in the room
03
Do whatever the thing needs
A startup taught me the job is whatever moves it forward: a pitch deck, a live demo, a cold-outreach email, or unglamorous grunt work. I don't wait for a perfectly-scoped ticket to start being useful.
No Fly List Kids · eight years of it
04
Make the claim checkable
I'd rather ship a result you can poke at than a number you have to trust. So I audit my own work until it holds, and where I can, I put the thing live in the browser so you can check it yourself.
NBA · the live explorer