Profile · §02
Issue 02 · May 2026 · Paris
Shafiya Kausar — portrait

From physics notebooks
to production ML.

I came to AI from an unusual angle — a BSc in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics from Bengaluru North University, then a leap to Paris for a Master's in AI & Data Science at Aivancity. The science background gave me a habit I lean on every day: be skeptical of your own results, run the controls, check whether what you measured is what you think you measured.

Since landing in Paris in 2024, I've worked across surprisingly different domains. Multimodal retrieval at NeuralTeks. Medical signal processing for seizure detection at AURA. Document intelligence research at Aivancity. NLP for recommendations at IntHealth. Currently agentic RAG and forecasting at INSEAD in Fontainebleau.

The thread is the same in every job: take messy real-world data, build the right model for it, and make it useful to someone outside the notebook.

I write clean Python, take MLOps seriously (Docker, MLflow, version-everything), and care about whether what I built actually works in production. Outside of paid work, I volunteer with Linkee distributing food across Paris and design UX for ethical-AI tools with the UN's Action Lab for Development.

Particulars

Based in
Paris, France
Languages
English (fluent), French (A1, learning)
Currently
AI Engineer at INSEAD
Open to
Full-time roles & selective freelance

Education

2024 — present
MSc AI & Data Science · Aivancity, Paris
2020 — 2023
BSc Physics, Chemistry & Mathematics · Bengaluru North University

Stack

PythonRSQL PyTorchTensorFlowscikit-learn Hugging FaceYOLOv5OpenCV PandasNumPyFlaskFastAPI DockerMLflowGit Power BIGoogle CloudAzure

Currently learning

Agentic systems, retrieval-augmented generation patterns, and the practical side of evaluating LLM-driven applications. Also: French, slowly.

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