Muhammad Ayain Fida Rana

Email: mafr2 (at) cam (dot) ac (dot) uk

I am a MPhil student in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, where I am working under the supervision of Prof. Mateja Jamnik.

Previously, I graduated with a BS Computer Science degree from the Lahore University of Management Sciences, where I was fortunate to be advised by Dr. Zafar Ayyub Qazi and Dr. Ihsan Ayyub Qazi.

My research interests lie at the intersection of networking systems and machine learning. I am keen on designing real-world, scalable systems that are not only efficient but also trustworthy and socially responsible.

Publications

Semantic Caching for Improving Web Affordability
Hafsa Akbar, Danish Athar, Muhammad Ayain Fida Rana, Zartash Afzal Uzmi, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Zafar Ayyub Qazi
(Under review in TheWebConf 2026)

LLM-Enabled Semantic Caching For Affordable Access
Hafsa Akbar, Danish Athar, Muhammad Ayain Fida Rana, Zartash Afzal Uzmi, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Zafar Ayyub Qazi
(Poster, WiML @ NeurIPS 2025)

Teaching

CS 582: Distributed Systems, LUMS, Fall 2024
Teaching Assistant

CS 310: Algorithms, LUMS, Fall 2024
Teaching Assistant

CS 202: Data Structures, LUMS, Spring 2024
Teaching Assistant

Awards & Honors

Vicky Noon Cambridge Scholarship (2025-26)
Cambridge Trust & Vicky Noon Educational Foundation, United Kingdom

Award of High Distinction (2025)
Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

Merit Scholarship (2022-23, 2023-24, 2024-25)
Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

Dean’s Honor List (2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24, 2024-25)
Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

Outstanding Learner Award (2020): Top in World A-Level Mathematics
Cambridge Assessment International Education, United Kingdom

Valedictorian & Roll of Honor (2019)
Beaconhouse Johar Town, Pakistan

Misc

• As a project for my Management Science class at LUMS, I built SarmayaCar, an intelligent used-car recommender that leverages NLP, optimization, and a dataset of 66k+ PakWheels listings to model depreciation and guide smart purchases.
• As a TA for Algo, I built an LLM-powered grader to extract and score responses (obv. followed by a manual pass) and scored them against a rubric with few-shot examples — ironically grading many answers that were also generated by LLMs.
• For anyone applying to grad school, here’s a precise template I used to track my applications.
• I own a typewriter, but I still end up writing memoirs/letters on Docs (:
• I love coffee a little too much. Here’s a quick peek at my coffee journal.