Issa Ahmed

I build autonomous robots, applied machine learning and AI systems, and full-stack tools.

Everything here is something I designed, built, and shipped.

Projects

Six projects, five I designed and built, one I fought for.
Two autonomous robots, an offline reinforcement-learning agent, two clinical machine-learning tools, and a federal advocacy campaign.

Open any sheet for the full story.

The RECLAIM robot on the capstone showcase floor: drive base, sensor mast, and 4-DOF sorting arm

SHT 01Robotics · ROS2 · Computer Vision

Open sheet: RECLAIM: Autonomous Waste-Sorting Robot

The assistive-navigation robot on its taped test course, red-tape waypoint markers on a white foam-board floor

SHT 02Robotics · ROS2 · Nav2 · Computer Vision

Open sheet: Assistive Navigation Robot

Cover of The Journal of Arthroplasty: the 2026 issue featuring the peer-reviewed pain-prediction paper

SHT 03Clinical machine learning · Published

Open sheet: Predicting Pain After Total Hip Arthroplasty

Court-zone heatmaps of learned shoot probability for the DQN and Dueling DQN agents: high near the basket, suppressed in mid-range

SHT 04Reinforcement learning

Open sheet: NBA Shot Selection: Offline Reinforcement Learning

SHT 05Clinical machine learning

Open sheet: Glenoid Morphology Classifier

Toronto Star · Op-ed · Sole author

Grounded: what it’s like to be a No Fly List kid

SHT 06Advocacy · Policy

Open sheet: No Fly List Kids: Federal Advocacy

View all six

Design philosophy

The work I care about sits where hardware and software meet.
It isn't finished until someone who isn't an engineer can understand it.

A few habits I keep coming back to.

01
Integrate across subsystems
My best work is where separate parts become one system. On RECLAIM that meant perception, control, firmware, and the arm. On the wheelchair it meant a vendor ROS2 stack running alongside my own nodes. Mechatronics taught me to work across the seams, not stay in one lane.
RECLAIM · the full stack
02
Translate between technical and non-technical
I was the only engineer among the MDs and PhDs on a published clinical paper, and at 16 I wrote a Toronto Star op-ed and did national interviews about a security-list failure. I can make a system legible to the people who have to act on it.
THA · the only engineer in the room
03
Do whatever the thing needs
A startup taught me the job is whatever moves it forward, whether that's a pitch deck, a live demo, a cold-outreach email, or grunt work. I find what needs doing and start on it, instead of waiting for the work to arrive already scoped.
No Fly List Kids · eight years of it
04
Make the claim checkable
I'd rather ship a result you can poke at than a number you have to trust. So I audit my own work until it holds, and where I can, I put it in front of people so they can check it too.
NBA · the live explorer