Asad Ali

Excited to be mentoring, alongside channa weeratunge, a graduate-level software engineering capstone project this semester for Dr. Pradeep Buddaraju at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Our students are building an Agentic AI application that researches market data and provides actionable recommendations for options traders focused on covered call strategies. It’s been refreshing to see the team quickly tackle requirements, domain research, and high-level design. You can follow their progress on the project site https://lnkd.in/dVNTpTxR A parallel goal of the project is to explore how AI can also contribute to building the application — using practices like test-driven development (TDD) to ensure contracts are honored throughout the SDLC.

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🔥 Austin Tech Week ‘25 🔥 It was an enjoyable week attending interesting talks that piqued my interest and aligned with my background in technology, sports, health, and nutrition. I connected with so many wonderful people at this conference hosted by Capital Factory in Austin, TX. Here are some quick highlights: 🎤 Jada Pickett hosted the Women in Tech event to kick off the week, spotlighting some PHENOMENAL WOMEN speakers:  🧘‍♀️ Michelle A. Florez led the discussion on Magnetic Leadership: The Feminine Way, dialing up our energy and focus with posture checks, deep breath work, and a powerful visualization exercise as we manifested and connected in ways we desire to thrive in this world. The “stage” was set to navigate the day and beyond with awareness, ease, and presence. Don’t play small; ). No coffee needed following that! I was spiritually caffeinated. 💃 Tracey Abbott, the keynote speaker, spoke on Leading With Intuition in the Age of AI. “The greatest barrier to transformation isn’t technology, it’s hesitation.” In this AI “nitro-boosted” world, it’s imperative that leaders are not only AI-powered but humanistic. Take some risks, trust your intuition, and allow that to power your growth and next adventure. 💪 Ashleigh Marie Brown spoke on The Pleasure Principle: A Radical Rethinking of the Modern Women’s Health Market. “The unlock to the biggest opportunity in women's health isn't another clinical breakthrough; it's understanding how culture, innovation, and identity are reshaping what women actually want and need from health and healthcare.” This set the tone for this enlightening talk. Panel discussions included: ✨ Carlisha Robinson & Bree Whitehead - The Human+AI Mindset: Practical Use Cases for Work and Play. This was a fun lunch and learn as the speakers provided insight into the AI tools used such as Google’s NotebookLM, Nano Banana, and Stream Realtime to assist with their workflows. 💎 Stephen Huerta, Nicolette Jackson, Carley Deardorff (she/her) - Getting Hired in 2025: Real Talk from Recruiters and Hiring Managers who highlighted, among other things, networking effectively, leveraging your community, and showcasing relevant skills for increased visibility to obtain your next role. 💫 Laura Avonius, Hannu Kinnunen, Dr. Trevor Colm, Victoria Williamson - Beyond Health Measurement: Personalization Drives Results. The speakers discussed wearable tech devices, the ŌURA ring for tracking health data points such as sleep and activity and CORTEX used by chiropractors to monitor the nervous system’s response in real time. In addition, the discussion describing the Audicin app, featuring music and binaural beats was noted for its holistic approach to support relaxation and mindfulness.   🚀 Thank you to all of the wonderful speakers for the great energy and education! If you’re interested in learning more about the discussions, connect with the speakers. I’ve posted the link to the conference in the comments below.

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I recently participated in the Houston Oil & Gas + Utilities Full Stack Hackathon and it was an incredible experience. 🚀 Huge thanks to Kevin Newell for the invite to this Raise x SkillsProject event. I spent a wild 48 hours tackling the mess that is log management and built AI Log Analyzer. It’s a tool that uses RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to actually make sense of thousands of log lines without losing your mind. The setup is basically Google Gemini paired with FAISS for vector search. The coolest part? Instead of just hunting for keywords like '404', this thing understands the context of what’s actually going wrong. I also made sure to build a strict citation system — it links every AI answer back to the original log line, so you know it’s not just hallucinating. Hackathons like these are basically high-pressure 'extended interviews.' They force you to ship production-ready code and dive into things like vector indexing and prompt engineering on the fly. That’s exactly the kind of growth I’m here for. What started as a 2-day sprint turned into a fully functional tool with a live dashboard and verifiable reporting. It’s pretty wild what you can build when you focus on a real problem. Full code and documentation on GitHub: https://lnkd.in/gjZ-8H3u

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Big news for Texas! Google is investing $40 billion into new data centers across the state — a huge move driven by the rapid growth of AI and cloud technologies.

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I’m excited to share a major update on the progressive web application I’ve been developing for the Neurology Department at UTHealth Houston. This stroke and neurological exam translation tool helps health care practitioners assess stroke in patients who don’t speak English. We’ve just reached our first development milestone, and the prototype was presented this weekend at a conference with the Texas Neurological Society. Now live as a GitHub Page at https://lnkd.in/gnfWpzXE , the current prototype includes English-to-Spanish support for scales such as the NIH Stroke Scale. Practitioners can play audio prompts in a patient’s native language, record responses, and have them ranked in-app to automatically calculate stroke severity and generate a structured, saveable score report to support clinical decision-making. The app also includes NIH Stroke Scale picture cards to help assess aphasia and dysarthria across languages. Future plans include expanding to a full mobile app, improving the UI, and adding support for languages such as Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. One of my favorite parts of app development is designing menu flow and information architecture. This means deciding what content will be most critical, always accessible, and most relevant to the user. In this project, those decisions shaped a bottom navigation bar that anchors the entire experience. My favorite challenge so far has been reinforcing proper clinical exam workflows to ensure complete, consistent data capture through guided user flow and validation using CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. In a long assessment like the NIHSS, it is easy to miss a prompt that could significantly impact data completeness and a patient’s final score. Adding a “Missing Entries” check before allowing users to finalize the exam, along with direct navigation back to incomplete questions, helped solve this issue. Thoughtful use of color and visual cues, such as green for call-to-action buttons, yellow for caution, and red for invalid inputs, further demonstrates how strong UX can support clinical accuracy. A design is working well when the user barely notices it. When the process is clear and efficient, health care practitioners can focus on doing their jobs quickly and hopefully saving more lives. Looking forward to continuing this project. Thank you to Ivan Trang, MD, for the commission, and to my dear friend Courtney Nguyen for the connection.

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Google’s $40B Texas build signals AI leadership is won on power, proximity, and packets, not software alone. Highlights • 💸 $40B through 2027 for three AI campuses (Armstrong & Haskell counties), shifting AI buildout to power‑rich Texas. • 👷 Thousands of construction/supplier jobs, hundreds of ops roles; 1,700 apprentices for high‑voltage, data center, and controls by 2030. • ⚡ Texas advantages: low‑cost power, faster interconnects, abundant land; hyperscalers (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta) and AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic) racing for capacity; ERCOT curtailment risk. • ☀️ One Haskell site paired with solar + battery to blunt peaks; long‑term PPAs to secure cleaner baseload and price certainty. • 🧊 Liquid‑cooled GPU racks and 400G/800G optical fabrics with tighter DCI to deliver predictable training/inference SLAs. • 🛰️ Network implications: diverse low‑latency routes to DFW/Houston; 400G/800G waves, OpenZR/ZR pluggables, and managed spectrum on regional fiber. • 📡 Edge play: near‑term MEC nodes in DFW–Abilene corridors integrated with private 5G, SD‑WAN, and low‑latency transport to Google Cloud regions. • 🧭 Operators: pre‑position duct and rights‑of‑way; turnkey DCI with ERCOT‑aware SLAs; shift non‑urgent training via flexible load orchestration. 📖 Full article via @TeckNexus: https://lnkd.in/gc9KgWqJ #AIInfrastructure #DataCenters #Hyperscale #OpticalNetworking #400G #800G #DCI #ERCOT #MEC #Private5G #SDWAN #Google

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Tech talent is powering Austin’s next chapter. Over the past five years, the Austin region’s tech sector has grown by 46%, adding nearly 30,000 jobs. With more than 7,500 graduates entering the pipeline each year, the region is not just sustaining momentum, it is shaping the industries of the future. Explore more in our latest white paper with WFS: https://hubs.la/Q03KTDFP0

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