Issa Ahmed
Project indexSHT 01–06

Projects

Six projects, five I designed and built, one I fought for: two autonomous robots, an offline-RL agent, two clinical ML tools, and a federal advocacy campaign.

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

SHT 01Robotics · ROS2 · Computer Vision

RECLAIM: Autonomous Waste-Sorting Robot

Team of 4: I owned perception + control

Indoor autonomous robot that scans, detects, drives, picks, and sorts waste across recyclable, compost, and landfill streams. Capstone project (3rd place).

Nav missions
15/15 (sim re-benchmark)
Perception
30 FPS on Jetson
Placement
3rd overall · 1st in AI division
As builtLive
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

Assistive Navigation Robot

Designed & built end-to-end

A ROS2 robot that maps a home, localizes, and drives itself to a named room, planning around obstacles, flagging floor hazards with computer vision, and confirming arrival by QR code. A smart-wheelchair prototype.

Room-to-room
route via Nav2
Hazard detection
10 Hz OpenCV
Arrival
QR-verified
As builtLive
Cover of The Journal of Arthroplasty: the 2026 issue featuring the peer-reviewed pain-prediction paper

SHT 03Clinical ML · Published

Predicting Pain After Total Hip Arthroplasty

2nd of 7 authors, the only engineer

Peer-reviewed ML pipeline comparing 13 models on 513 patients from the SAFE-T cohort. Co-authored with Sunnybrook + University of Toronto Orthopaedics.

Journal
J. Arthroplasty 2026
Best T3 MSE
2.70 vs 3.07 baseline
Patients
513 (SAFE-T cohort)
Published
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

NBA Shot Selection: Offline RL

Solo course project

A Dueling DQN with a per-entity Deep Sets architecture, trained on real SportVU tracking to call shoot-or-pass, then audited until its own headline metric broke, and regrounded on real shot outcomes.

Vs NBA selection
+0.19 to +0.32 PPS (real outcomes)
Shot-quality model
AUC 0.733
Trained on
116,928 possessions
Audited & regroundedLive

SHT 05Clinical ML

Glenoid Morphology Classifier

Solo project

A three-tier ML pipeline that maps CT-derived shoulder measurements onto the Walch glenoid classification, with the real trained model running live in your browser. Healthy-vs-diseased screen ~91% (AUC 0.98).

Healthy-vs-diseased
~91% · AUC 0.98
Walch classes
6
End-to-end 6-way
~63% (honest)
LiveIn-browser model
Toronto Star · Op-ed · Sole author

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

SHT 06Advocacy · Policy

No Fly List Kids: Federal Advocacy

Coalition member since 2017

Long-running federal advocacy via the No Fly List Kids coalition. Toronto Star op-ed, multiple media features, direct engagement with the PMO and federal Cabinet.

Legislation
Bill C-59 · passed 2019
Redress funding
$81M (2018 budget)
Op-ed
Toronto Star · sole author
Ongoing

In preparation · SHT 07

RideGuide, an AI transit assistant for the Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area: live arrivals, delays, and trip planning across 10 agencies, drawn from real-time GTFS-RT feeds and fronted by an LLM query pipeline. Full write-up on the way. More sheets to follow.