Machine Learning Engineer x Robotics Researcher

Ali Al-Bustami

I build practical AI systems that bridge software and physical machines. My focus is modular, deployable machine learning for robotics, autonomy, and real-world decision pipelines.

I am currently a Robotics Engineering master's student at the University of Michigan, after completing my bachelor's in Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Jordan.

Open Channel View Codebase

Filter project/publication cards by skill:

[01]

System News Feed

03/2026 Paper accepted at IEEE SoutheastCon 2026.
01/2026 Published Jetsonizer, a CLI toolkit for NVIDIA Jetson setup, with Zenodo DOI.
11/2025 Judged and mentored at Columbia University Robotics Hackathon MakeCU.
05/2025 Paper accepted at IEEE ARM.
04/2025 Two workshop papers accepted at ICRA.
03/2025 Two papers accepted at IEEE EIT.
01/2025 Joined Bio-Inspired Machine Intelligence (BIMI) as a Graduate Researcher.

[02]

Publication Modules

LLM planning-and-tools evaluation workflow from the paper

When Do Tools and Planning Help Large Language Models Think? A Cost- and Latency-Aware Benchmark

Subha Goshal, Ali Al-Bustami | IEEE SoutheastCon 2026

Benchmarks one-shot prompting vs plan-execute-replan with tools on Event-QA and CMV, quantifying the accuracy/latency trade-off and showing when tool orchestration helps or hurts.

arXiv

Jetsonizer: Smoother and Faster NVIDIA Jetson Setup

Ali Al-Bustami, Zaid Ghazal, Humberto Ruiz-Ochoa | Software Release, 2026

DOI Code Project

Systematic Evaluation of Initial States and Exploration-Exploitation Strategies in PID Auto-Tuning

Zaid Ghazal, Ali Al-Bustami, Khouloud Gaaloul, Jaerock Kwon | IEEE ARM 2025

arXiv Project

B-ROVERETTE: Be RObotic Vehicle for Education and Research

Ali Al-Bustami, Humberto Ruiz-Ochoa, Jaerock Kwon | ICRA Workshop 2025

Project

HILDE: A Human-in-the-Loop Differential Evolution Framework for Rapid PID Tuning

Zaid Ghazal, Ali Al-Bustami | ICRA Workshop 2025

Project

DriveNetBench: Single-Camera Benchmarking for Autonomous Driving Networks

Ali Al-Bustami, Humberto Ruiz-Ochoa, Jaerock Kwon | IEEE EIT 2025

arXiv Code Project

From Players to Champions: Generalizable Match Outcome Prediction from FIFA Data

Ali Al-Bustami, Zaid Ghazal | IEEE EIT 2025

arXiv Project

[03]

Professional Experience Stack

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Woven by Toyota

Jan 2026 - Present

Company

Research Assistant

Bio-Inspired Machine Intelligence (BIMI) Laboratory

Jan 2025 - Present

Visit Lab

Machine Learning Engineer

Beyond AI

Jun 2022 - Dec 2025

Company

Mechatronics Engineer Intern

Bosch Sensortec

Summer 2023

Company

[04]

Skills Operating System

A modular map of the stack I use to ship robotics systems from sensor wiring to deployed autonomy.

System Pipeline

Sensor Ingestion → Perception → Planning/Control → Edge Deployment → Monitoring

[05]

Licenses and Certifications

Nvidia's NeMo Agent Toolkit: Making Agents Reliable

DeepLearning.ai & NVIDIA | Issued Dec 2025

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NVIDIA Technologies

NVIDIA | Issued Feb 2024

Skills: GPU, Cloud Computing, HPC, Data Centers, Parallel Computing.

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Flying Car and Autonomous Flight Engineer

Udacity | Issued Nov 2022

Grade: Excellence. Focused on robotics, autonomous flight, and control systems.

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Lean Six Sigma Green Belt (ICGB)

JAQM | Issued Oct 2021

Quality engineering methods for process optimization and structured improvement.