Elia Ghazal

Software Engineer · AI Researcher

I build things that have to survive contact with reality. Then I go looking for where they don't.

CrashLens is a crash-detection platform I co-built that cuts emergency dispatch from roughly 14 minutes to about 30 seconds, validated end-to-end on real hardware, not a demo. SHARP-RAG is a retrieval pipeline I built, then reported honestly when it underperformed its own baseline, because the failure taught me more than a clean win would have. I write about both kinds of work, engineering post-mortems and the personal stuff, when something needs examining instead of shipping. 3.81 GPA, five semesters on the Distinguished List, but I'm more interested in what I do with it: a PhD or an engineering role where the problems have real stakes, not a system that only works in the demo.

Elia Ghazal

IEEE ICCA 2026 paper · 1 preprint · 1 in review cycle

5 projects · 2 live in production

English C2 · Arabic Native · French B2

Work

CrashLens
End-to-end IoT and AI crash detection with emergency dispatch and insurance reporting
Python · Raspberry Pi 5 · Cloudflare Workers · Flutter
2025→ details
SHARP-RAG
Self-correcting agentic RAG pipeline for multi-hop question answering
Python · LangGraph · ChromaDB · HuggingFace
2026→ details
EmotionAI
Real-time facial emotion recognition with a custom SE-attention CNN and a live Grad-CAM dashboard
Python · TensorFlow/Keras · MediaPipe · Flask/SocketIO
2025→ details
Web Bluetooth Medical Dashboard
Browser-native BLE dashboard streaming live physiological data from medical devices
ASP.NET Core · C# · Web Bluetooth API
2025→ details
DFA Minimization Visualizer
Interactive automata builder with step-by-step Hopcroft minimization for teaching
C++17 · Qt 6 Widgets
2024→ details

Research


IEEE ICCA 2026 · ACCEPTED

CrashLens: Smart Crash Detection and Emergency Response via IoT and Artificial Intelligence

E. Alghazal, G. Khayat, W. Ishak, B. Farhat, M. Allaw · Advised by Dr. C. Boustany, AUST

CrashLens is an embedded crash-detection and emergency-dispatch platform. A Raspberry Pi 5 with a six-axis IMU polls acceleration at 100 Hz and confirms a crash by sustained threshold, not vision inference, then dispatches an SOS over LTE on telemetry alone, before any video has uploaded, cutting measured dispatch latency from roughly 14 minutes to about 30 seconds in bench tests. Video and key frames upload afterward on a separate path, triggering a forensic stage that runs Gemini multimodal video analysis in parallel with license-plate OCR, cross-checked against Lebanon's vehicle registry, surfaced through a Flutter driver/responder app and a Next.js insurance dashboard.

Paper link coming upon publicationLive Site
PREPRINT · ZENODO · JUNE 2026

SHARP-RAG: Self-Correcting Hierarchical Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Elia Alghazal · Independent Researcher · Beirut, Lebanon

Multi-hop question answering requires chaining evidence across several documents, a setting in which naive RAG frequently fails because it retrieves once and never verifies whether the retrieved context supports an answer. SHARP-RAG addresses this with a four-agent LangGraph pipeline: a Planner, Retriever, Critic, and Synthesizer cooperate in a cyclic stateful graph where the Critic emits a structured JSON verdict that gates answer generation and drives targeted re-retrieval. Evaluated on 20 HotpotQA fullwiki questions, SHARP-RAG underperforms both baselines.

Finding: the self-correcting loop underperformed naive RAG, driven by over-triggering from the 8B evaluation critic standing in for the intended 70B model, not the architecture itself. Numbers below.

SystemEMF1Latency
Naive RAG25.0%29.5%18.0s
Planning Baseline25.0%28.1%24.8s
SHARP-RAG v215.0%15.8%57.2s
Read PaperGitHub
ACL ROLLING REVIEW · OCT 2026 CYCLE

Paper under anonymous review

Title, results, and an interactive demo will be posted here once the review period ends in December 2026.

Experience


Instructor, AI Summer Camp for High-School Students, AUST

Designed and taught a two-day introductory AI/programming curriculum for high-school students, covering programming fundamentals, control flow, and prompting AI systems, with hands-on beginner project building. Built all curriculum and materials solo.

Backend Development Intern, SmartCode SAL

Built backend systems with Spring Boot, including a custom socket server handling ISO-message point-of-sale transactions and Kafka-based messaging.

Education


B.S. Computer Science, AUST · Zahle, Lebanon

GPA 3.81 / 4.00Graduated with High Distinction4.00 Semester GPA, Fall 2024-25Distinguished List × 5Honor's List × 1CCNA Switching, Routing & Wireless

Contact


Open to graduate study discussions, research collaborations, and engineering roles.