M A U Shariff is a Ph.D. student and Graduate Research Assistant in the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, advised by Dr. Byrav Ramamurthy. He received his Master of Science in Computer Science from UNL in 2025 with a perfect 4.0 GPA, following a B.Sc. from Port City International University where he graduated as Department Topper. Shariff’s research lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Next-Generation Networking. He specializes in developing neuro-symbolic and foundation models for traffic forecasting, anomaly detection, and autonomous network management on large-scale Research and Education Networks (RENs). His recent work includes benchmarking transformer architectures on Internet2 backbone traffic and developing hybrid GRU-LSTM models for robust forecasting. He plays a lead role in the lab’s NSF-funded project on REN traffic analysis and maintains the open-source RONA analysis tool. An active member of the academic community, Shariff has served as a peer reviewer for top-tier venues including IEEE INFOCOM, WCNC, and VTC. His work has been recognized with several awards, including the 2025 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Graduate Student Research Grant and multiple NSF AraFest travel grants. Beyond research, he serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for core CS courses and has prior industry experience in software development and technical instruction.