Ahmed Taha

Machine Learning Researcher · Patent Technology Specialist at Proskauer Rose

Intrigued by the opportunity to apply his technical skills to the legal domain, Ahmed Taha transitioned from serving as a USPTO Patent Examiner to joining Proskauer Rose as a Patent Technology Specialist. He is currently pursuing an M.S. in Computer Science at Columbia University, where his research focuses on agentic AI safety/alignment and computer vision for medical imaging.

Publications

First page of Stubborn or Sycophantic? paper

Stubborn or Sycophantic? Auditing What Sycophancy Evaluations Measure

Zhang, H., Chew, A., Soe, R., Taha, A., Li, R., Shah, A., & Chaudhary, M.

NeurIPS TAE 2026 Poster · Cited by 0

TL;DRAudits what anti-sycophancy evaluations actually measure by scoring frozen system prompts under both valid corrections and misleading user pressure on SycoBench-600 across Phi-3-mini, Llama-3.1-8B, and Mistral-7B — a reversal-only score can reward blanket stubbornness (one prompt cuts Llama's harmful reversals by 53.7 points but also its valid corrections by 46.0), no prompt improves correction selectivity on all three models, and prompt verdicts do not transfer uniformly across models.

First page of SpineFairBench paper

SpineFairBench: A Counterfactual Benchmark for Auditing Demographic Sensitivity in Spinal Radiology VLM Reports

Taha, A., Taeha, A., & Ahmadzada, M.

Preprint, 2026 · Under review · Cited by 0

TL;DRPaired counterfactual benchmark that audits whether nine frozen vision-language models change their spinal-radiology reports when apparent age and sex are edited while target pathology is preserved — measurable recommendation drift in all nine, with management recommendations less stable than diagnostic-label overlap under the same demographic edit.

First page of MedInsider paper

MedInsider: A Benchmark for Documentation Integrity in Medical LLM Agents Under Institutional Pressure

Taha, A., Taeha, A., & Ahmadzada, M.

Preprint, 2026 · Under review · Cited by 0

TL;DRBenchmark and simulated EHR environment of 840 clinical scenarios in 420 matched pairs that tests whether medical LLM agents preserve documentation integrity when institutional context rewards shortcuts — across seven agents, task completion and documentation integrity diverge, and a pre-submission compliance check reduces discrepancies at a measurable cost to task completion (four-reviewer validation, Fleiss' κ = 0.905).

Browse the full publications page, with abstracts and citations →

Software

openfold-3 #344

Reworked per-run MSA output handling (#31) in OpenFold-3 so each run gets a unique temporary workspace: raw ColabFold records are saved as soon as the server response validates and OpenFold-formatted alignments once processing finishes, with new save_openfold_outputs, save_colabfold_outputs, and colabfold_output_dir settings, plus cleanup that can no longer delete explicit output directories.

openfold-3 #363

Moved OpenFold-3 inference intermediates (#342) out of /tmp and under <output_dir>/openfold3_intermediates, so temporary MSA and template files left by a crashed cluster job stay next to that job's outputs; directories created by a run are removed after normal completion or a handled error.

openfold-3 #384

Annotated OpenFold-3 inference configurations (#342), split out of #363 at a maintainer's request: typed InferenceDataModule.inference_config as InferenceJobConfig, narrowed InferenceExperimentRunner to InferenceExperimentConfig, and removed the 17 matching mypy-baseline.txt entries without changing runtime behavior.

openfold-3 #386

Added an optional residue_name for SMILES ligands (#323) in OpenFold-3 without changing the LIG# defaults: explicit names are trimmed, uppercased, and validated as ASCII alphanumeric, rejected on collisions with CCD, non-canonical, or standard polymer residue names, and carried into the SMILES component mapping, with full names written to mmCIF and three-character truncation documented for legacy PDB output.

openfold-3 #388

Fixed assigned C=C planarity on OpenFold-3's default inference path (#136): RDKit-assigned E/Z, non-aromatic sp2 C=C bonds are detected and their heavy-atom dihedrals pulled to the assigned cis/trans plane by a flat-bottom correction late in diffusion, with one more projection after rollout so the sampler cannot undo it, while queries without matching bonds are left unchanged; the worst targeted dihedral deviation fell from 101.13° to 15.01°.

Contact

Education

Work Experience

August 2026 - Present

Patent Technology Specialist

Proskauer Rose LLP · Full-time

Supporting patent prosecution and litigation.

September 2025 - May 2027

M.S. Computer Science (Machine Learning)

Columbia University, Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science

(Thesis track)

September 2025 - Present

Research Assistant

Columbia University · Part-time

Machine Learning Research

scholar.google.com/citations?user=FQ1XbKcAAAAJ

— Currently developing an RL policy to enhance AI-assisted tumor segmentation for radiation imaging under Dr. Yading Yuan
— Led the development of SpineFairBench and MedInsider; under review as first author

January 2025 - August 2026

Patent Examiner

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office · Full-time

Alexandria, Virginia, United States · On-site

GS-11 Patent Examiner · January 2026 - August 2026
— Evaluated 50+ machine learning and imaging patent applications, determining novelty and patentability through comprehensive prior art searches
— AU: 2613

GS-9 Patent Examiner · January 2025 - January 2026
— Awarded commendation letter from OPQA Director for office action quality

August 2024 - August 2026

M.S. Cybersecurity

Johns Hopkins University, Whiting School of Engineering

June 2020 - January 2025

Software Engineer

District Hut LLC

Led full-stack development projects generating over seven figures in revenue. Built patient-management systems, auto-dealer platforms, and restaurant applications. Registered trademark for company slogan.

2018 - 2024

B.S. Computer Science

California State University, Sacramento, College of Engineering and Computer Science

— Senior Capstone: Adapted Strength - Contributions Github
— D2 Wrestling Sports Club

August 2017 - February 2021

Sales Manager & Sales Specialist

Metro by T-Mobile

Sacramento, California, United States · On-site

Sales Manager · Full-time · August 2018 - February 2021

Sales Specialist · Part-time · August 2017 - August 2018

April 2016 - August 2017

Salesperson

Clothes4Bros · Part-time

Sacramento, California, United States · On-site

December 2013 - January 2020

Construction Worker

AAAnR Developers · Part-time

Sacramento, California, United States · On-site

Laid tile in kitchens and bathrooms.