Dr. Junaid Farooq, PhD
AI & Machine Learning Expert and Researcher

About Me

I'm an experienced AI researcher and engineer with a background in building and deploying large-scale AI systems and generative models. My expertise spans across artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, NLP, and computer vision, with a particular focus on creating impactful solutions in innovation discovery and automated insights.

Education

• PhD in Artificial Intelligence
  National Institute of Technology Srinagar
  Thesis: Breaking Barriers in Forecasting: A Hybrid Deep Learning Approach to Spatiotemporal Dynamics

• M.Tech in Electrical Engineering
  National Institute of Technology Srinagar
  Thesis: Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Systems for Microgrid Control

• B.Tech in Electrical Engineering
  National Institute of Technology Srinagar
  Thesis: Transient Stability Analysis of Power Systems

Professional Experience

Chief Architect &

Vice President of Artificial Intelligence 

Since Apr 2025 

Sprouts.ai

San Francisco, California, USA

Sprouts is a pre-integrated intelligent martech platform that replaces the need to buy multiple databases, intent products, and sales outreach platforms.

Role and Responsibilities: --- Leading the building of an ai-native platform with multi agentic conversational interface powered by an AI Search Engine over a large and diverse Data infrastructure ---

• Lead the Gen AI division in building production-ready generative applications, including RAG-based research assistants, agentic AI systems, and real-time video sales agents, for integration into client-facing workflows.

• Architect complex AI systems involving modular pipelines, query routers, semantic retrievers, and token-efficient LLM interfaces capable of multi-source document synthesis and live agent response.

• Drive the agentic AI initiative, enabling context-aware, self-updating assistants capable of follow-up questioning, long-term memory, and real-time decision-making across heterogeneous data sources.

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers, fostering deep expertise in prompt engineering, embeddings, LLM fine-tuning, and modular GenAI architecture, while cultivating a team culture of innovation and ownership.

• Lead the IP & Patents track, identifying novel contributions and supervising filings in areas like multi-agent orchestration, hybrid retrieval, and dynamic routing for GenAI systems.

• Collaborate cross-functionally to drive adoption of AI-powered summarizers, analyzers, trend reporters, and conversational research bots—aligned with sales, marketing, and innovation intelligence workflows.

• Establish iterative evaluation pipelines, with tooling for auto-evals and human-in-the-loop assessment to ensure quality, transparency, and responsible AI usage.

• Lead technical research in Generative AI, continuously studying the latest advancements in LLMs, RAG, agent frameworks, and evaluation methodologies, and translating them into practical innovations within the platform.

- Own end-to-end AI vision, platform architecture, and technical roadmap across data, search, LLM systems, and agentic workflows.

- Lead and scale the AI organization, including hiring, mentoring, team structure, performance, and long-term capability building.

- Act as final technical authority on AI architecture, system design, and AI-native platform decisions.

- Partner closely with CEO, CTO, Product, and GTM leadership to align AI strategy with revenue, customer impact, and company growth.

- Drive company-wide transition from AI-ready to AI-native systems, including agentic workflows, retrieval systems, and autonomous decisioning.

- Own AI governance, evaluation frameworks, and production quality standards across all GenAI deployments.

- Lead IP, patents, and long-term technical differentiation strategy in multi-agent systems, AI search, and RAG architectures.

Principal Machine Learning Architect &

Head of Artificial Intelligence 

Aug 2023 to Apr 2025 

StartUs Insights

Vienna, Austria 

StartUs Insights provides a Big Data & AI-powered SaaS platform for discovering over 5 million startups and scaleups globally. It offers tools for identifying emerging companies and technologies, serving 1,000+ corporate partners including Samsung, Nestlé, and Siemens Gamesa.

Role and Responsibilities:

• Leading the AI team to deploy and fine-tune LLMs and generative models, analyzing massive database enhancing platform's capability in innovation discovery.

• Cutting-edge research in generative AI.

• Utilizing the state of the AI technologies to build AI powered features such as chatbots, summerizers, analyzers, content generators (text, image, video) for data enrichment, data precision, and semantic search.

• Spearheading the integration of advanced AI technologies, significantly improving data analysis and insights.

• Mentoring the AI team in advanced methodologies, fostering a culture of innovation and ensuring AI projects align with strategic business objectives.

Machine Learning Engineer

Head, R&D / Research Team Lead

Mar 2023 – Aug 2023 (6 Months)

Genie AI, INC

Toronto, Canada 

I lead the R&D efforts of the team and work on the design, development, and implementation of machine learning architectures and NLP models for intuitive AI assistants (AI powered chatbot) and other AI applications. 

Role and Responsibilities:

·       Lead the R&D Team to achieve the company’s goals.

·       Help develop NLP chatbot based on proprietary data sets using GPT and other LLMs.

·       Train, test, and optimize NLP models to improve understanding and generation of natural language 

·       Work closely with software engineers to integrate machine learning models into production systems 

·       Ensure the scalability, reliability, and performance of machine learning and NLP components 

·       Assist RPA engineering team to design, develop and implement RPA solutions to automate business processes 

·       Assist and develop other automation and machine learning related requirements

·       Use Langchain, LLM’s, and other AI/ML tools to achieve the above objectives.

Senior Research Fellow                                                                    

Dec 2021 – Dec 2024 (2 Years)

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering

National Institute of Technology Srinagar, India

Responsibilities included research in deep learning and computational intelligence, in addition to teaching assistance for different undergraduate and postgraduate courses, both theory and lab.

Junior Research Fellow                                                                                                      

Dec 2019 – Dec 2021 (2 Years)

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering

National Institute of Technology Srinagar, India

Responsibilities included research in deep learning and computational intelligence, in addition to teaching assistance for different undergraduate and postgraduate courses, both theory and lab.

Machine Learning Engineer

Jan 2017 – Dec 2019 (3 Years)

Comp Soft Solutions

Sopore, India

The company provides development, tech support, and training in a wide range of IT applications.

Role and Responsibilities:

·       Design, development, training, testing, and deployment of Machine Learning systems.

·       Tech support to clients

·       Technical Training

Automation Engineer

Oct 2015 –Dec 2016 (1 Year, 3 Months)

ETA-PCS

(A member of ETA STAR GROUP)

Dubai, UAE

Responsibilities and Achievements:

·       Design, integration, programming, site commissioning and site testing of Automation systems.

·       Secured the highest paying on-campus placement of 2015 at NIT Srinagar during the final semester of B.Tech degree.

·       Completed the company’s training in a record time of two months, becoming the youngest engineer in ETA STAR group to be allocated a project.

Scientific Editor & Reviewer  (Freelancer)                                                    

Since March 2021 (3 Years, 6 Months) 

Editage

Cactus Communications

-        A leading company that offers editing and reviewing services to researchers and authors around the globe.

Role and Responsibilities:

·       Editing and scientific/technical review of research and technical papers in Artificial Intelligence and Engineering

·       Received multiple awards for high performance, productivity, and client satisfaction

·       Edited/Reviewed hundreds of research and technical papers.

Internship

Research Intern

(One month) May 2023 

Quantum AI Global

Edison, NJ, USA

The company provides AI-powered software platforms and quantum computing solutions with easy integration into existing systems in addition to providing consultancy services, training, and support in artificial intelligence technology to organizations.

Role and Responsibilities:

·       Design and development of AI based products.

·       Conduct research that evolves into development of Intellectual Property Rights for the company.

·       Lead and conduct training sessions in AI for the company and its subsidiaries.

·       Research in quantum computing

Research Publications

1.     Junaid Farooq, Danish Rafiq, Pantelis R. Vlachas, and Mohammad Abid Bazaz (2024). RefreshNet: Learning Multiscale Dynamics through Hierarchical Refreshing. Nonlinear Dyn (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-024-09813-3

2.     Junaid Farooq & Mohammad Abid Bazaz. (2023). Multiscale Autoencoder-RNN Architecture for Mitigating Error Accumulation in Long-Term Forecasting. Accepted for presentation at 2023 International Conference on Emerging Techniques in Computational Intelligence to be held at Hyderabad on 21-22 Sep. 2023. [Best Presentation Award]

3.     Junaid Farooq & Mohammad Abid Bazaz. (2023). Deep Learning based Adaptive Predictive Control of Radar-Guided Missile. Defence Science Journal. https://doi.org/10.14429/dsj.73.18481

4.     Danish Rafiq, Junaid Farooq, & Mohammad Abid Bazaz. (2021). Synergistic use of Intrusive and Non- intrusive Model Order Reduction Techniques for Dynamical Power Grids. International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems, 138, 107908, doi.org/10.1016/j.ijepes.2021.107908

5.     Manzoor A. Wani, Junaid Farooq, & Danish Mushtaq Wani (2021). Risk assessment of COVID-19 pandemic using deep learning model for J&K in India: a district level analysis. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, 1-11. doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17046-9 

6.     Junaid Farooq & Mohammad Abid Bazaz. (2021). 2021, August). Deep Learning for Self-tuning of Control systems. In 2021 International Conference on Emerging Techniques in Computational Intelligence (ICETCI) (pp. 6-11). IEEE. (IEEE Computational Intelligence Society), August 25-27, 2021. [Best Paper Award] doi.org/10.1109/ICETCI51973.2021.9574048

7.     Junaid Farooq & Mohammad Abid Bazaz. (2021). A Deep Learning algorithm for modeling and forecasting of COVID-19 in five worst affected states of India. Alexandria Engineering Journal. doi.org/10.1016/j.aej.2020.09.037 

8.     Junaid Farooq & Mohammad Abid Bazaz. (2020). A novel adaptive deep learning model of Covid-19 with focus on mortality reduction strategies. Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 138, 110148. doi.org/10.1016/j.chaos.2020.110148 

Certificates 

(Click on the blue hypertext to view the certificates/credentials)

·       Deep Learning Specialization - Coursera (deeplearning.ai)

·       Neural Networks and Deep Learning - Coursera (deeplearning.ai)

·       Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter tuning, Regularization and Optimization - Coursera (deeplearning.ai)

·       Structuring Machine Learning Projects - Coursera (deeplearning.ai)

·       Convolutional Neural Networks - Coursera (deeplearning.ai)

·       Sequence Models - Coursera (deeplearning.ai)

·       Modern Robotics, Course 1: Foundations of Robot Motion – Coursera (Northwestern University) 

·       Covid-19 Outbreak: Prediction, Forecasting, Data Analysis and Data Visualization – EduxLabs (April 2020)

·       A deep understanding of deep learning (with Python intro) – Udemy

·       ChatBots: Messenger ChatBot - DialogFlow and nodejs – Udemy

·       Complete Chatbot Course Using Rasa Framework & Python – Udemy 

·       Natural Language Processing with Python – Udemy 

·       The Complete SQL Bootcamp – Udemy 

Awards & Achievements

·       Received Best Paper Award for presenting the paper entitled "Deep Learning for Self- Tuning of Control Systems" at the “International Conference on Emerging Techniques in Computational Intelligence (ICETCI 2021)” organized by IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Mahindra University, NVIDIA, and Tech Mahindra at Hyderabad, India, during 25-27 August, 2021. 

·       International Fellowship in Engineering Studies (2011-2015); IDB Jeddah

·       Fellowship for M.Tech from Ministry of Human Resources Development (Now renamed as Ministry of Education), Government of India, August 2017 – June 2019.

·       Research Fellowship for PhD from Ministry of Human Resources Development (Now renamed as Ministry of Education), Government of India – Since December 2019.