Karim Ghaddar

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

About

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

Selected Projects

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

Autonomous Robotic Foosball

Autonomous foosball-playing robot controlled by closed-loop visual feedback on an Nvidia Jetson. 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 control (bypassing, flushing) to drive a scratch-coded (Atari) Pong game at 100MHz.

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Verilog / Vivado / FPGA

FPGA-Accelerated HFT Gateway

A low-latency trading pipeline PoC: a C++ feed handler on an RP2040 streams orders over SPI to an Artix-7 FPGA implementing an O(1) systolic-array order book and hardware risk checks in Verilog, measuring tick-to-trade latency. Real-time telemetry via UART to a Rust TUI dashboard.

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Verilog / C++ / FPGA

High-Frequency Settlement Engine

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 batch-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

Naive Bayes sentiment model trained on scraped Twitter data. Built a full ETL pipeline using Snscrape and Scikit-learn; correctly called both 2016 primaries and the general election.

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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