Muhamed Alarbi
Distributed systems engineer building LLM-based systems
PhD, Computer Science · Western University · London, Ontario
My doctoral research focused on orchestrating applications across the cloud-edge continuum: placing serverless workflows across cloud data centers, 5G edge zones and local devices, and adapting how their components communicate. As that work progressed, I turned to AI, using large language models as schedulers. I now design and build LLM-based systems, including a retrieval-augmented document platform, hybrid product search and AI content moderation. Before my PhD, I worked for several years as a backend and full-stack developer, and I have taught distributed systems at Western.
Selected work
Selected research and engineering projects.
LLM systems
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LINGUA
LLM-driven, intent-aware scheduling for the cloud-edge continuum
Operators describe what they want in plain language, such as lower latency or lower cost, and a large language model produces the deployment plan. A guardrail checks every plan and sends violations back to the model until the plan is valid, so changing the objective means editing a prompt, not rewriting a scheduler.
Across 20 models from 7 providers, the strongest came within about 1% of the optimum found by a MILP solver.
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MAPeR²
Memory-augmented LLM agents for personalized energy recommendations
A multi-turn LLM agent that gives households day-ahead recommendations for when to run their appliances, taking time-of-use electricity prices into account. It keeps track of the conversation, recalls past interactions from a vector database, and turns each finished session into lessons about what worked and what to avoid.
With episodic recall, recurring schedules were accepted in a single turn with no corrections.
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Archive Assist (دليل)
Arabic document intelligence · Digital Assets
A platform I design and build end to end at Digital Assets. Scanned Arabic official documents and spreadsheets become a searchable archive that answers questions with citations to the exact page or row, with briefing notes and decision memos built on top. Sensitive documents are processed only by on-premise models.
Go, PostgreSQL, Meilisearch and SolidJS, with a model layer that works across seven LLM providers.
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Marketplace search
Semantic and hybrid product search · Digital Assets
Product search for an Arabic e-commerce marketplace that combines keyword matching with OpenAI embeddings in Meilisearch. An LLM generates search keywords for every product, covering Modern Standard Arabic synonyms, Libyan and other dialect words, and English, so shoppers find products in the words they actually use.
A relevance cutoff set from measured score bands, related-product recommendations from embedding similarity, and a database fallback if the index is down.
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Content moderation
AI moderation for an online marketplace · Digital Assets
Every product listing, review and seller profile is checked against the marketplace’s policy by an LLM with strict structured output, from illegal goods and scams to off-platform contact details and political content. It reads Libyan dialect and Arabizi, and also assigns each product’s category and shipping size.
Runs asynchronously through a transactional outbox and job queues; only high-confidence verdicts are acted on automatically, and the rest go to human review.
Cloud–edge
- LINGUA
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I-PACE
Choosing the right messaging protocol at the edge
On a commercial 5G testbed spanning edge devices, AWS Wavelength and the AWS cloud, I measured HTTP, MQTT, NATS and Zenoh (12,620 measurements) and showed that the best protocol depends on payload size and where the broker runs. I then trained models that choose the protocol for each request.
Mean latency 33.9% lower than the best fixed protocol.
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ECO
Orchestrating serverless function chains across cloud, 5G edge and devices
A hierarchical orchestrator and developer platform for building, testing and placing serverless workflows across the continuum, deployed on an AWS Region and an AWS Wavelength zone on Bell’s 5G network in collaboration with AWS Edge Computing.
Multi-tier placement reduced end-to-end latency by up to 16% for large payloads.
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SCOPE
Smart cooperative parking environment
A cooperative parking platform in which distributed software agents manage public and private parking facilities from real-time sensor data, so drivers spend less time searching and owners can offer unused spaces.
- Sensing as a Service
Publications
Newest first.
Experience
Research and industry.
Teaching
Western University, Department of Computer Science.
Graduate Student Teaching Award, 2022–2023
Faculty of Science, Western University, in recognition of exemplary teaching work in the Department of Computer Science.
Education
Skills
- AI & LLM systems
- Retrieval-augmented generation, semantic and hybrid search, LLM-based content moderation, agents with memory and guardrails, prompt engineering, structured extraction, LLM evaluation
- Distributed systems
- Orchestration and scheduling, serverless workflows, messaging (NATS, MQTT, Zenoh), job queues, edge and 5G MEC
- Languages
- Python, Go, Java, TypeScript, SQL
- Back end
- NestJS, Spring Boot, FastAPI, Go net/http, Prisma, BullMQ
- Data
- PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Weaviate, Meilisearch, DynamoDB
- Cloud & DevOps
- AWS (EC2, Wavelength, IoT, DynamoDB), Docker, Kubernetes, Linux
- Machine learning
- Random Forest, XGBoost, neural networks (FNN, LSTM), Optuna, MILP (Gurobi)
Contact
I’m open to roles in applied AI, distributed systems and research. The quickest way to reach me is by email.