Zakria Askani

Founder and Lead AI Engineer at Sea Star AI Technology

Self employed / Freelance • ZZP

Jan 2019 - Present • 7 yrs 10 mos

I founded Sea Star AI Technology, an AI development company in Genoa, Italy, and lead its engineering. We design, build and deploy AI for clients in healthcare, manufacturing, utilities, hospitality, logistics and media. Highlights: an AI calling agent for a large hospital that makes 1,000+ calls a day in English, Urdu and French and reached 75,000 patients in 3 months; sewer CCTV defect detection with YOLO11 and RF-DETR at 92.0% mAP@50, cutting the review team from 4-5 inspectors to 1; eyewear defect segmentation for the EssilorLuxottica SMARVY AI Challenge, rated 1st among European participants; real-time playing-card recognition at 98.4% mAP@50 with a Django web app and desktop apps; and LLM automations, chatbots and AI agents for hotels, food manufacturing and our own multilingual website.

LLM Engineer

NielsenIQ • Fulltime

Nov 2022 - Oct 2024 • 1 yr 11 mos

At GfK Etilize (part of NIQ since 2023): designed and deployed generative AI products with frontier and open-source models, testing more than 20 state-of-the-art models with Hugging Face, LangChain and Gradio. Built RAG systems, QLoRA fine-tuning, AI agents and multi-modal pipelines. Projects included a multi-modal customer support assistant that understands text, audio and images; an AI knowledge worker that answers company questions from shared drive data; an AI programmer that sped up software workflows by more than 60,000x; and a model that predicts prices of unseen e-commerce products. Worked across the full LLM lifecycle, from inference to fine-tuning, and shipped production-ready AI products.

AI Engineer (Internship)

K

Mar 2020 - Oct 2021 • 1 yr 7 mos

Developed and deployed AI and machine learning models for predictive maintenance, fault detection and load forecasting at Karachi's power utility. Worked with cross-functional teams to refine algorithms, analyse large datasets and turn results into actionable insights.