About

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Tom Goldstein. I work on machine learning systems for language models, retrieval, evaluation, robustness, and multimodal understanding.

I am interested in building AI systems that are not only more capable, but more inspectable, steerable, and useful under real-world pressure. Recent work includes scalable retrieval pretraining, self-supervised LLM evaluation, long-video question answering, watermark reliability, content moderation, and benchmark design.

This summer I am interning at Microsoft AI. Previously, I was a Research Scientist Intern at Adobe Research in 2025 and 2023.

Before UMD, I completed my B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering at United International University in Dhaka. I also enjoy teaching and building resources that make technical ideas feel less mysterious. Earlier versions of this site grew out of that impulse: writing intuitive explanations, sharing projects, and documenting things I was learning.

Outside research, I still have a soft spot for visualizations, photography, and cinema.

You can reach me at khalids@cs.umd.edu, find code on GitHub, or see the complete publication list on Google Scholar.