Muhamed Alarbi

Distributed systems engineer building LLM-based systems

PhD, Computer Science · Western University · London, Ontario

My doctoral research focused on orchestrating applications across the cloud-edge continuum: placing serverless workflows across cloud data centers, 5G edge zones and local devices, and adapting how their components communicate. As that work progressed, I turned to AI, using large language models as schedulers. I now design and build LLM-based systems, including a retrieval-augmented document platform, hybrid product search and AI content moderation. Before my PhD, I worked for several years as a backend and full-stack developer, and I have taught distributed systems at Western.

Research network: three lines of work meeting at LINGUA and MAPeR² Appliancemodes HYDROSAFE Sensing asa Service SCOPE ECO I-PACE ArchiveAssist Marketplacesearch Contentmoderation LINGUA MAPeR² Research network: three lines of work meeting at LINGUA and MAPeR² Appliancemodes HYDROSAFE Sensing asa Service SCOPE ECO I-PACE Archive Assist Marketplace search Content moderation LINGUA MAPeR²

Selected work

Selected research and engineering projects.

LLM systems

  1. LINGUA

    LLM-driven, intent-aware scheduling for the cloud-edge continuum

    Operators describe what they want in plain language, such as lower latency or lower cost, and a large language model produces the deployment plan. A guardrail checks every plan and sends violations back to the model until the plan is valid, so changing the objective means editing a prompt, not rewriting a scheduler.

    Across 20 models from 7 providers, the strongest came within about 1% of the optimum found by a MILP solver.

    Paper to be submittedWith AWS Edge Computing

  2. MAPeR²

    Memory-augmented LLM agents for personalized energy recommendations

    A multi-turn LLM agent that gives households day-ahead recommendations for when to run their appliances, taking time-of-use electricity prices into account. It keeps track of the conversation, recalls past interactions from a vector database, and turns each finished session into lessons about what worked and what to avoid.

    With episodic recall, recurring schedules were accepted in a single turn with no corrections.

    IEEE WF-IoT 2026 · accepted

  3. Archive Assist (دليل)

    Arabic document intelligence · Digital Assets

    A platform I design and build end to end at Digital Assets. Scanned Arabic official documents and spreadsheets become a searchable archive that answers questions with citations to the exact page or row, with briefing notes and decision memos built on top. Sensitive documents are processed only by on-premise models.

    Go, PostgreSQL, Meilisearch and SolidJS, with a model layer that works across seven LLM providers.

    Digital Assets · 2026–present

  4. Content moderation

    AI moderation for an online marketplace · Digital Assets

    Every product listing, review and seller profile is checked against the marketplace’s policy by an LLM with strict structured output, from illegal goods and scams to off-platform contact details and political content. It reads Libyan dialect and Arabizi, and also assigns each product’s category and shipping size.

    Runs asynchronously through a transactional outbox and job queues; only high-confidence verdicts are acted on automatically, and the rest go to human review.

    Digital Assets · 2026

Cloud–edge

  1. LINGUA
  2. I-PACE

    Choosing the right messaging protocol at the edge

    On a commercial 5G testbed spanning edge devices, AWS Wavelength and the AWS cloud, I measured HTTP, MQTT, NATS and Zenoh (12,620 measurements) and showed that the best protocol depends on payload size and where the broker runs. I then trained models that choose the protocol for each request.

    Mean latency 33.9% lower than the best fixed protocol.

    Paper to be submitted

  3. ECO

    Orchestrating serverless function chains across cloud, 5G edge and devices

    A hierarchical orchestrator and developer platform for building, testing and placing serverless workflows across the continuum, deployed on an AWS Region and an AWS Wavelength zone on Bell’s 5G network in collaboration with AWS Edge Computing.

    Multi-tier placement reduced end-to-end latency by up to 16% for large payloads.

    IEEE ICCCN 2024

  4. SCOPE

    Smart cooperative parking environment

    A cooperative parking platform in which distributed software agents manage public and private parking facilities from real-time sensor data, so drivers spend less time searching and owners can offer unused spaces.

    IEEE Access 2023

  5. Sensing as a Service

Publications

Newest first.

  1. LLM systems and Residential energy lines
    MAPeR²: A Multi-Turn Memory-Augmented Agentic-AI Paradigm for Personalized Residential Energy Recommendations A. Jaradat, M. Alarbi, A. Haque, H. Lutfiyya. 2026 IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT). Accepted, to appear
  2. LLM systems and Cloud–edge lines
    LINGUA: AI-Driven Intent-Aware Scheduling for the Cloud-Edge Continuum M. Alarbi, R. Belson, A. Jaradat, A. Haque, H. Lutfiyya. To be submitted
  3. Cloud–edge line
    I-PACE: Intelligent Protocol Adaptation for the Cloud-Edge Continuum over 5G M. Alarbi, A. Jaradat, A. Haque, H. Lutfiyya. To be submitted
  4. Cloud–edge line
    ECO: Edge Continuum Orchestrator Framework for Managing Serverless Chains across the Cloud-Edge Spectrum M. Alarbi, R. Belson, H. Lutfiyya. 2024 33rd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), IEEE, 2024.
  5. Residential energy line
    HYDROSAFE: A Hybrid Deterministic-Probabilistic Model for Synthetic Appliance Profiles Generation A. Jaradat, M. Alarbi, A. Haque, H. Lutfiyya. Sensors, vol. 24, no. 17, p. 5619, 2024. doi:10.3390/s24175619
  6. Cloud–edge line
    SCOPE: Smart Cooperative Parking Environment M. Alarbi et al. IEEE Access, vol. 11, pp. 120346–120361, 2023.
  7. Residential energy line
    Appliances Operation Modes Identification Using States Clustering A. Jaradat, M. Alarbi, et al. 2023 International Conference on Smart Applications, Communications and Networking (SmartNets), IEEE, 2023.
  8. Cloud–edge line
    Sensing as a Service Middleware Architecture M. Alarbi, H. Lutfiyya. 2018 IEEE 6th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud), Barcelona, Spain, 2018, pp. 399–406.

Experience

Research and industry.

  1. 2026 – present

    AI Systems Engineer

    Digital Assets, Libya (remote)

    Designing and building AI products end to end: Archive Assist (دليل), an Arabic document-intelligence platform; semantic and hybrid search for an e-commerce marketplace; and an AI content-moderation system.

  2. 2020 – 2026

    Doctoral Researcher

    Western University, London, Ontario

    Cooperative resource management and intelligent orchestration for the cloud-edge continuum: LINGUA, I-PACE, ECO, SCOPE and MAPeR², in collaboration with AWS Edge Computing and Algoma University.

  3. 2018 – 2019

    Full Stack Java Developer

    FikraTech, Tripoli, Libya

    RESTful APIs and web applications in Spring Boot and AngularJS across the full development life cycle, from client requirements to deployment on AWS.

  4. 2017 – 2018

    Full Stack Java Developer (Contract)

    KODAK One, California, USA

    Blockchain-based image-licensing platform: payment-gateway integrations and a multi-tenant payment system.

  5. 2015 – 2017

    Research Assistant

    Western University, London, Ontario

    Designed and built a cloud-based Sensing-as-a-Service IoT middleware with a SQL-like language for discovering remote sensors.

  6. 2011 – 2014

    Software Developer and Teaching Assistant

    Tripoli, Libya

    Back-end development at Intelligent Mechatronic Systems and The Bright Tech; teaching assistant at the University of Tripoli.

Teaching

Western University, Department of Computer Science.

Graduate Student Teaching Award, 2022–2023

Faculty of Science, Western University, in recognition of exemplary teaching work in the Department of Computer Science.

  1. Winter 2026

    Course Instructor, CS4459/CS9466

    Selected Topics on Scalable & Robust Distributed Systems

    Taught about 90 undergraduate and graduate students. Built lectures on distributed mutual exclusion and election, Raft consensus, and sharding; four programming assignments with Docker-based autograders; and the exams.

  2. 2021 – 2025

    Teaching Assistant

    CS1026, CS1030, CS2033, CS4459/CS9466

    Lead TA for Computer Science Fundamentals (CS1026), managing a team of 16 TAs; labs, proctoring and marking across introductory programming, multimedia and communications, and distributed systems.

Education

  1. 2020 – 2026

    PhD, Computer Science

    Western University, London, Ontario

    Thesis: Cooperative Resource Management and Intelligent Orchestration for the Cloud-Edge Continuum. Supervisor: Prof. Hanan Lutfiyya.

  2. 2015 – 2017

    MSc, Computer Science

    Western University, London, Ontario

    GPA 92%, Honors. Research topic: Middleware Architecture for Sensing as a Service.

  3. 2007 – 2011

    BSc, Computer Science

    University of Tripoli, Tripoli, Libya

Skills

AI & LLM systems
Retrieval-augmented generation, semantic and hybrid search, LLM-based content moderation, agents with memory and guardrails, prompt engineering, structured extraction, LLM evaluation
Distributed systems
Orchestration and scheduling, serverless workflows, messaging (NATS, MQTT, Zenoh), job queues, edge and 5G MEC
Languages
Python, Go, Java, TypeScript, SQL
Back end
NestJS, Spring Boot, FastAPI, Go net/http, Prisma, BullMQ
Data
PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Weaviate, Meilisearch, DynamoDB
Cloud & DevOps
AWS (EC2, Wavelength, IoT, DynamoDB), Docker, Kubernetes, Linux
Machine learning
Random Forest, XGBoost, neural networks (FNN, LSTM), Optuna, MILP (Gurobi)

Contact

I’m open to roles in applied AI, distributed systems and research. The quickest way to reach me is by email.