Mahdi Erfanian

I’m Mahdi Erfanian, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I am a member of the IndexLab under the supervision of Dr. Abolfazl Asudeh. I received my B.Sc in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. My research spans Multimodal Data Management, Generative AI, Algorithmic Fairness, and Foundation Models.

I am particularly interested in employing foundation models, including large language models, to address different challenges in data management—such as mitigating bias in training data and enhancing multi-modal data retrieval through synthetic data generation. My work has led to systems that outperform state-of-the-art baselines like OpenAI’s CLIP by 200% in mean average precision on complex natural language queries. Additionally, I am passionate about Algorithm Design, with a focus on optimizing both fairness and efficiency in data-driven systems.

I am seeking a 2026 Research Scientist Internship to build scalable AI products in areas including multimodal retrieval, foundation models, and vector databases.