Rakeh Saleem

Data Scientist|Applied Research Scientist|Research-to-Industry Lead|PhD in Engineering

currently |

Engineering Entrepreneurship Drones Creating
Explore my work

Hey, I'm Rakeh.

I'm a Data Scientist at GA Telesis, where I build demand-forecasting and Document AI systems — transformer and gradient-boosting pipelines running in production on AWS.

Before industry, I earned my PhD at Penn State, teaching machines to see the way expert inspectors do — using eye tracking, drones, and deep learning to assess buildings and bridges. That research thread is still very much alive.

If you're working on hard problems where models have to survive contact with the physical world, let's talk.

Portrait of Rakeh Saleem

Always exploring

models, coastlines, and cups of tea

Places I've worked, studied, and spoken
11
Publications
300+
Citations
7
h-index
2
Invited talks
Current focus
Distilling gaze-informed attention into ViTs for edge UAV deployment
Document AI for privacy-sensitive workloads (LayoutLMv3, VLMs)
Intermittent-demand forecasting running daily in production
Peer review for computer vision and SHM journals
Selected work

Things I've built and studied

All projects →

Gaze-informed inspection AI

Using eye tracking to capture how expert inspectors visually assess damaged structures, then distilling that attention into saliency models and vision transformers.

eye-trackingsaliencyViT
See the research →

UAV bridge inspection

Drone-based visual inspection with geo-tagged capture and deep CNNs — built on data from 50+ inspection flights, turning slow manual surveys into instant, repeatable assessment.

UAVCNNgeo-tagging
See the project →

Aviation demand forecasting

Production forecasting for intermittent, hard-to-predict demand — transformer and gradient-boosting ensembles on AWS, delivering probabilistic forecasts to decision-makers daily.

TFTSageMakerMLOps
See the project →
Research

Recent publications

All publications →
Integrating sustainability in engineering: a global review Sustainability · 2025 Comparative analysis of saliency map algorithms in capturing visual priorities for building inspections J. Building Eng. · 2024 Evaluating human expert knowledge in damage assessment using eye tracking: a disaster case study Buildings · 2024 Analysis of gaze patterns during facade inspection to understand inspector sense-making processes Sci. Reports · 2023

Let's connect

Working on forecasting, computer vision, or infrastructure AI? Hiring for applied science? Or just want to talk shop about drones and models — I'd love to hear from you.

Get in touch