Greetings,
I’m Ataf (/atef/), a first year CS PhD student (Fall 2025) at George Mason University š°. My research interest lies in the field of software and systems security. Currently, I’m pursuing my PhD under the guidance of Dr. Qiang Zeng
As of now, I’m working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Before this, I worked for 2+ years as a software security engineer at a SV startup called OpenRefactory
. During that time, I triaged and fixed vulnerabilities in open-source
and proprietary software. I also got to work with some non-profits such as OpenSSF and Apache Software Foundation.
During my undergraduate studies, I served as the President of BUET EDC, VP of BUET Cyber Security Club. I participated in various CTF competitions with my teams. I also hosted a few local CTF competitions as the lead organizer.
Now most of my days are spent reading papers. I like to read non-fictions, go on walks every now and then. I’m currently reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
By the way, my nickname is Rabid (/rabeed/).
Education
Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science
George Mason University
August 2025 - Present
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science & Engineering
Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology
April 2018 - May 2023
Higher Secondary Certificate
Notre Dame College, Dhaka
June 2015 - May 2017
Publications
Interaction and NLP Based Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Food Review in Social Media
Undergraduate Thesis
Supervisor: Dr. Sadia Sharmin (BUET)
GitHub | Paper | Thesis Book
In this study, we collected data from different Facebook pages to analyze the sentiment of social media users regarding food review. For this, we used reactions and comments to analyze the sentiment in two independent ways.
Experience
Graduate Teaching Assistant
George Mason University
August 2025 - Present
Software Security Engineer
OpenRefactory Inc.
July 2023 - July 2025
Fullstack Web Developer
Mindshare Bangladesh
June 2021 - Nov 2021
CV
My latest CV can be found here .