Jason Cusati

djjay@vt.eduGitHub: djjay0131LinkedIn: jason-cusati
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Professional Summary

Computer Science PhD candidate and applied researcher who bridges large-scale software engineering with empirical AI/ML research. Two decades architecting Azure data platforms and SaaS systems now grounds research that is reproducible, deployable, and measured against real workloads, spanning LLM-assisted software engineering, security classification, and mechanistic interpretability. Published at ICSE 2026, with hands-on depth in ML pipelines, evaluation design, and the engineering rigor that industry R&D depends on.

Professional Experience

Virginia Tech — Blacksburg, VA
Graduate Research Assistant -- ARCADE Lab (PI: Dr. Afsari)
  • Designed and built cloud infrastructure for the Multi Robot System (MRS) for Remote Construction Progress Monitoring, including network architecture, mesh VPN, REST API, and Web UI.
  • Hardened the platform with 2FA on the Web UI, secured video streaming, and instrumented audit logging across services.
Yoh, A Day & Zimmerman Company — Remote, SC
ADF Solution Architect -- Core Specialty Insurance
  • Led a small SDE team delivering V1 of an Insurance Data Ingestion Platform for a specialty carrier: extended Microsoft's Common Data Model into a domain schema for the carrier's data types; reduced time-to-ingest by 50%.
  • Used Claude as engineering partner to scaffold pipeline code and generate ADF source-to-target mappings; hand-implemented the more complex transformation and validation logic.
Duck Creek Technologies — Columbia, SC
Senior Technical Architect -- OnDemand SaaS Operations
  • Developed Python algorithm to predict Sev 1 incidents from logs.
  • Coordinated in PEN testing and consulted on risk mitigation options for pre go-live security assessment.
Earlier employment history includes tenure as Principal Engineer -- Sustained Engineering, Blackbaud; Solution Architect -- Enterprise Professional Services, Blackbaud; Software Engineering Consultant, DJJayNet Consulting.

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science (SE with AI/ML/MI), Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA
M.S., Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA
B.S., Economics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

Selected Projects & Research

Agentic Knowledge Graphs for Research Progression — Orchestrated agent system (Navigator / Extractor / Continuation) building an LLM-curated research KG --- problems, assumptions, constraints, evidence spans, datasets, metrics --- as the provenance substrate for downstream research-assistant responses. Denario agent framework; Python / FastAPI; staging deployed on Cloud Run. Approaching experimental comparison against LLM-generated KGs.
VTTSI — LLM-Adaptive Intersection Safety Scoring — Distributed rewrite of a CS6604 traffic-safety application: provenance-tracked evidence ingestion (NWS weather, VDOT/511 cameras) → deterministic RT-SI + MCDM baselines → Claude Opus adaptive adjustment with grounding guardrails and deterministic fallback → honest-null ablation eval (Spearman / Pearson). Python ports-and-adapters microservices; live-Claude integration wired; ~97% offline coverage.
Construction-AI: LLM- and KG-backed Material Takeoff — Web app parsing architectural drawings (DWG / DXF / PDF), extracting geometry via PyTorch / OpenCV / EasyOCR, producing JSON material takeoffs with OR-Tools cut-list optimization backed by a Neo4j LLM-curated KG. Phase 1 MVP deployed on Cloud Run; Phase 5 in progress adds a VVUQ (verification / validation / uncertainty quantification) layer for engineering-simulation reproducibility.

Publications

Journal Articles

Virginia Tech Transportation Safety Index (VTTSI) — Jason Cusati, Cheng-Shun Chuang. arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.21154
Exploring the Evidence-Based SE Beliefs of Generative AI Tools — Chris Brown, Jason Cusati. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.13900

Conference Proceedings

From Papers to Progress: Rethinking Knowledge Accumulation in Software Engineering — Jason Cusati, Chris Brown. Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026)

Technical Skills

Platforms

Windows; Linux; IIS; Apache; Tomcat

AI/ML

scikit-learn; TensorFlow; LLM; RNN; CNN; LSTM; SVM; Random Forest; Feature Engineering

Tools

Azure; Azure API; AWS; Docker; PostgreSQL; SQL Server; FastAPI; Streamlit; VS Code; PyCharm; Wireshark

Languages

Python; C#; Java; JavaScript; Bash; PowerShell; T-SQL; C++; Node.js

Miscellaneous Experience

Awards and Achievements

Phi Kappa Phi, inducted member --- national honor society recognizing academic excellence across all disciplines.
Omicron Delta Kappa, inducted member --- national leadership honor society.
Customer Service Award, LimeLeap Professional Services.

Certification

  • Certified Jira & Confluence Administrator
  • Certified Scrum Master
  • Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP)