Portrait of Saleeq Adnan Syed

Security engineering · detection pipelines · BU MSCS Jan 2026

Saleeq Adnan Syed — MSCS, Boston University · distributed systems & AI/ML

Adnan Syed

My SOC platform runs statistics first and intelligence second: Z-score detection, per-IP baselines, threat-feed correlation, then a Gemini agent for ATT&CK attribution — the analyst always gets the final call.

Facing a shipping deadline, I put a rolling Z-score inside the stream instead of an ML detector — 50,000+ events/min, 96% anomaly accuracy, zero model drift to manage.

50K+Events / min
99.9%Pipeline uptime
30%p99 variance cut
IEEEPublished 2024

Case studies

Two decisions worth explaining

Epidemic Intelligence Platform Python · Kafka · Spark · OpenShift · PostgreSQL
Problem

Outbreak signals had to surface from a raw health-event stream in real time, not in a nightly batch.

Constraint

A hard delivery deadline: no time to build, train, and validate an ML detection layer, and no appetite for model-drift maintenance after ship.

Key decision

Run a rolling Z-score inside the Spark stream instead of a trained model: O(1) per event, deterministic, and every anomaly carries an explainable numerical reason (deviation from the rolling mean).

Tradeoff

Sacrificed multi-dimensional context and adaptive thresholds; a slow-building signal hovering near the mean can evade a static threshold, and false negatives run higher than a trained classifier would allow.

Verified result

50,000+ events/min at 99.9% uptime on OpenShift Kubernetes, 96% anomaly accuracy, guarded by an 87-test PyTest suite in CI.

AegisView-SOC TypeScript · React · Kafka · MITRE ATT&CK · Gemini 2.5 Flash
Problem

SOC analysts need every network event triaged and mapped to a MITRE ATT&CK technique before they look at it.

Constraint

The system supports analyst-in-the-loop investigation, not autonomous blocking — so the design favors high sensitivity and explainability over ML-grade precision.

Key decision

Z-score statistical detection as the first pass, then recover recall in layers: per-IP behavioral baselines make thresholds adaptive per device, external threat feeds (Emerging Threats, Feodo, URLhaus) supply the context the statistics can't see, and a Gemini 2.5 Flash SOC agent re-analyzes each anomaly for a narrative and ATT&CK attribution.

Tradeoff

Pure statistical detection misses low-amplitude, distributed attacks that stay near the mean — accepted, because the analyst plus AI enrichment adjudicates true vs. false positives; for autonomous blocking or a tighter false-positive SLA, this design would be insufficient and would need ML.

Verified result

Full TypeScript/React pipeline from raw telemetry to a configurable, ATT&CK-attributed alert feed, with multi-signal confidence fusion (Z-score + compliance rules + protocol breakdown + forensic chain integrity).

HaloSpec Rust · Adaptive control · HTTP API
Problem

Speculative-decoding throughput has to be measured against latency stability, but p99 latency swings hard under real runtime contention.

Constraint

The harness ran as a single local process against one inference endpoint, with contention simulated by a single CPU busy-loop thread and every other knob pinned (max_tokens, step counts, draft-length bounds). No cluster and no hardware headroom to absorb latency spikes — the controller had to stay stable on its own.

Key decision

Drive draft-length convergence with an EMA-smoothed adaptive controller instead of a fixed threshold, deriving dynamic thresholds from smoothed latency percentiles under non-stationary runtime conditions.

Tradeoff

EMA smoothing lags sudden load spikes by design — accepted, because that damping is exactly what cut p99 variance under contention.

Verified result

30% p99 latency variance reduction under CPU load injection, with an SLO-aware scoring model quantifying throughput-vs-stability tradeoffs.

Open source

Open — in review Backstage · community-plugins PR #9703

Opened a pull request to Backstage (CNCF community-plugins) adding README auto-detection for the azure-devops plugin. Currently in review — addressed multiple rounds of maintainer feedback.

32/32 tests passing · CI green View pull request

Also built

More projects

HaloSpec

Rust harness for LLM speculative decoding. EMA-adaptive controller cutting p99 latency variance 30% under CPU contention; SLO-aware throughput-vs-stability scoring.

Tradeoff: EMA smoothing lags sudden load spikes by design — accepted, because damping is exactly what cut p99 variance 30% under CPU contention.

RustAdaptive ControlHTTP API
Repository →
AetherFlow

3D drone-swarm logistics digital twin: A* multi-agent pathfinding and cyber-physical threat modeling via Three.js/WebGL, FastAPI simulation backend with parameterized scenario replay.

Tradeoff: parameterized replay gives up live improvisation — accepted, because deterministic runs are what make swarm-scenario regression testing possible.

TypeScriptThree.jsWebGLFastAPI
Repository →
PeerDorm

Event-driven MERN platform at 1,000+ concurrent users with sub-100ms Socket.IO messaging; Redux state management cut UI latency 25%. Oral presentation, IEEE Asian Conference 2024.

Tradeoff: a single Redux store adds boilerplate on every feature — accepted for predictable state flow, which cut UI latency 25% at 1K+ concurrent users.

ReactNode.jsMongoDBSocket.IOIEEE 2024
Repository →
AetherFlow

Real-time 3D simulation with Three.js/WebGL rendering, A* multi-agent pathfinding, and a TypeScript/FastAPI event-driven architecture with parameterized workflow replay.

Tradeoff: parameterized replay gives up live improvisation — accepted, because deterministic runs are what make swarm-scenario regression testing possible.

TypeScriptThree.jsWebGLFastAPI
Repository →
Rental Price Predictor

6-model stacking ensemble (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, Random Forest) over 29,985 listings; NLP sentiment analysis, PowerTransformer scaling. MSE 0.055 — 66% under the 0.16 baseline.

Tradeoff: a 6-model stacking ensemble sacrifices interpretability and inference speed — accepted for accuracy: MSE 0.055, 66% under baseline.

PythonXGBoostLightGBMNLP
Repository →

Stack

Technical stack

Security engineering

MITRE ATT&CKBurp SuiteNmapWiresharkVAPTOAuth 2.0 / JWT

Systems & backend

RustJavaPythonTypeScriptSpring BootFastAPINode.js

Distributed infrastructure

Apache KafkaApache SparkKubernetesOpenShiftAWSDockerGrafana

AI & ML engineering

PyTorchTensorFlowXGBoostLangChainRAGScikit-learnNLP

Credentials

Certifications

CodePath · Summer 2026
AI301 AI Open Source Capstone
In progress · Expected Aug 2026
Red Hat · May 2023
RH134 System Administration II (Certificate of Attendance)
Internshala · Nov 2022
Ethical Hacking & VAPT

Also completed: coursework and job simulations via Cybrary, Coursera, Forage (Deloitte, MasterCard), Snyk CTF, HackerRank, Infosys Springboard, and Microsoft x LinkedIn (Generative AI Essentials).

Connect

I like problems where the interesting part is the tradeoff.

An EMA-adaptive controller in Rust cut p99 latency variance 30% under CPU contention. Open to full-time roles in backend, distributed systems, AI/ML, and security engineering. Post-OPT EAD — no sponsorship required currently.