Emplay
Agentic AI engineer
My current role: building agentic AI systems as an engineer at Emplay.
About
Faizan Ayoub (Hajam)
Agentic AI engineer at Emplay · Founder of Kashmir AI Research and CalmConnect
I build AI for two things mainstream technology tends to leave behind: the Kashmiri language (کٲشُر), spoken by more than seven million people and still poorly served by mainstream AI systems, and mental health support for students. I work across the stack, from data pipelines and model training to evaluation and the web platforms people actually use.
I contribute to the open-source community through Hugging Face and GitHub, sharing Kashmiri language tooling and models for research use, under the licences of the underlying data.
Work
Kashmir AI Research
Founder, NLP researcher
Language technology so AI can learn Kashmiri: a contamination-controlled benchmark (KashEval), an aggregated Kashmiri–English parallel corpus, a public Kashmiri→English translator (NLLB-200 fine-tuned on 93,064 pairs), blinded native-speaker evaluation, and an open hub of 205 Kashmiri NLP resources.
CalmConnect
Founder, AI architect
A mental health technology platform for students, parents and psychologists across India. It integrates validated psychometric instruments (PHQ-9, GAD-7, PSS-10) with AI-enabled screening, crisis intervention and analytics.
Milestones
- Sep 2026
Kashmiri→English translator goes live
NLLB-200 fine-tuned on 93,064 BPCC pairs, served at kashmirairesearch.online/translate. - Jul 2026
Best Paper, ICRTC-2026
Anatomy of Decoder-Only LLM Failure in Low-Resource Machine Translation, with Neha Prerna Tigga (Springer). - 2026
Kashmiri NLP resource hub
An open catalogue of 205 datasets, papers, models, tools and research groups, 1932–2026. - Early 2026
CalmConnect Research
An academic study of student mental health across Indian institutions, using validated clinical instruments. - Dec 2025
Founded CalmConnect
An AI-enabled mental health platform for students, parents and psychologists.
Skills
Machine translation & NLP
- Neural MT fine-tuning (NLLB-200)
- LLM fine-tuning (LoRA / QLoRA)
- Corpus construction and filtering
- Test-set contamination analysis
- Perso-Arabic and Devanagari text processing
Evaluation
- BLEU, chrF++, COMET
- Paired bootstrap significance
- Human evaluation design
- Inter-annotator agreement
Engineering
- PyTorch, Transformers, CTranslate2
- Python, pandas, NumPy
- Next.js, React
- Supabase (auth, RLS), Vercel
Research practice
- Kaggle and Colab GPU/TPU pipelines
- Psychometric instruments (PHQ-9, GAD-7)
- Statistical analysis
- Academic writing
Education
MSc, AI & Data Analytics
Amity University, Noida · completed2024–2026
BSc, Applied Science (Physics)
RIMT University · 9.12 CGPA2020–2023
Higher secondary
MET HR Secondary School, Sopore2009–2019
Passionate about serving as an educator in Qur'an, Seerah, and Sunnah-based character and leadership development, shaping emotional resilience in individuals.
Quick facts
Full name
Faizan Ayoub (Faizan Hajam Ayoub)
Based in
Greater Delhi Area, India · roots in the Kashmir Valley
Role
Agentic AI engineer at Emplay; founder of Kashmir AI Research and CalmConnect
Research focus
Low-resource machine translation, evaluation and contamination, Kashmiri language technology
Education
MSc AI & Data Analytics (Amity University), BSc (RIMT University)
Aim
Help AI learn Kashmiri, so the language lives on in the digital age
Questions
Who is Faizan Ayoub?
Faizan Ayoub (also known as Faizan Hajam) is an AI researcher, developer and entrepreneur from the Kashmir Valley, India. He works as an agentic AI engineer at Emplay, and is the founder of Kashmir AI Research, which builds language technology for Kashmiri, and of CalmConnect, a mental health technology platform.
What does Kashmir AI Research do?
It builds the pieces AI needs to learn Kashmiri: a contamination-controlled benchmark, an aggregated parallel corpus, a public Kashmiri→English translator, native-speaker evaluation, and an open hub of 205 Kashmiri NLP resources.
What is CalmConnect?
CalmConnect is an AI-enabled student mental wellness platform founded by Faizan. It uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG with FAISS) to support emotional wellbeing, reduce burnout and build resilience.
Where did Faizan Ayoub study?
He holds an MSc in AI & Data Analytics from Amity University, Noida (2024–2026), and a BSc in Applied Science from RIMT University (9.12 CGPA).
Get in touch
For collaboration on Kashmiri NLP, low-resource AI or mental health technology, email faizan@kashmirairesearch.online, or write through LinkedIn. Kashmiri speakers can also help directly by taking part in the current study.