Karim Ghaddar

ECE/CS Graduate & Software/Hardware (Systems) Engineer. US Citizen.

About

I'm a recent ECE/CS graduate from Duke University interested in hardware, software, networking, and security. My academic, internship, and personal projects span software engineering, hardware design, embedded systems, cybersecurity, and robotics. You can see some of them below!

Selected Projects (Scroll →)

Note: Repositories private as some projects are still active assignments. Access available upon request.

Autonomous Robotic Foosball Table

Autonomous foosball playing robot using closed-loop visual feedback on Nvidia Jetson. Can be a mechatronic RL testbed. Deploys quantized custom EfficientNet ONNX models via TensorRT to control stepper motors at 30fps.

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C++ / TensorRT / Robotics / Embedded

32-bit RISC CPU & FPGA Pong

Custom 5-stage pipelined processor with MIPS-based ISA implemented on Xilinx FPGA. Features full hazard handling (bypassing, flushing) to drive a scratch-coded Pong game at 100MHz.

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Verilog / Vivado / FPGA

Orderbook Matching Engine (MCU + FPGA)

A full-stack low-latency trading system distributed across an RP2040 MCU and Artix-7 FPGA. Implements an O(1) systolic array order book and hardware-level risk checks in SystemVerilog on an Artix-7 FPGA connected via SPI to a C++ feed handler on RP2040 measuring tick-to-trade latency. Real-time telemetry via UART to a TUI dashboard.

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Verilog / C++ / FPGA

C Matching and Go Settlement Orderbook/Ledger

High-throughput trading engine with C execution and Go settlement. Includes custom slab allocation for zero-GC matching, binary framing over Unix Sockets to reduce jitter, and a group-commit protocol that aggregates database transactions.

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C / Go / PostgreSQL

Auto-Remediation Security Agent

End-to-end pipeline that scrapes C repositories and detects vulnerabilities using CodeBERT embeddings. Identified integer overflows and OOB writes in public code and generated concrete fixes via Gemini API.

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Python / BERT / NLP / Security

Quadratic Sieve Factorization

High-performance implementation of the Quadratic Sieve algorithm for integer factorization. Optimized generation of B-smooth numbers to demonstrate RSA vulnerability.

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Python / Cryptography / Math

Election Sentiment Analyzer

Predictive Naïve Bayes model trained on scraped Twitter data. Built full ETL pipeline using Snscrape and Scikit-learn to forecast 2016 election results with high accuracy.

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Python / Scikit-learn / Data Science

Experiments in Verification

Formal, Assertive and Probabilistic Verification Experiments on Verilog Code

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SystemVerilog / SymbiYosys / Testbenching

Technical Skills

Core Languages Python [PyTorch, Flask, Django, Pandas, NumPy], JavaScript [TypeScript, React], Go [gRPC], SQL [PostgreSQL], C++/C, Verilog [Vivado, RTL]
Infrastructure AWS [ECS, Lambda, RDS], Terraform, Docker
Databases PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB