Mohamed Hefny

About

Most of my career has been on the layer other engineers build on: web services and APIs at Intact and Morgan Stanley, then AWS CloudFormation, the service teams use to define their infrastructure as code. Since February 2025 I've been at Microsoft.

Alongside work I'm a graduate student at Simon Fraser University, graduating in fall 2026. My research is in visual SLAM and 3D Gaussian splatting: getting a single moving camera to work out where it is and what the world around it looks like. I'm especially interested in what happens when conditions turn bad, which is why this page has weather controls.

I studied software engineering at Concordia University in Montreal and later completed Stanford's Machine Learning Specialization. I'm also a large-language-model enthusiast.

origin

London, Ontario

trained

B.Eng. Software Engineering, Concordia

studying

Graduate student, SFU (fall 2025 – fall 2026)

current

Microsoft, since Feb 2025

previous

AWS CloudFormation · Morgan Stanley · Intact

research

visual SLAM · 3D Gaussian splatting

Experience & education

1. Sep 2025 – Fall 2026 (expected)

   Graduate student, Simon Fraser University

   Research in visual SLAM and 3D Gaussian splatting.

   Python · C++ · Visual SLAM · Gaussian splatting

2. Feb 2025 – present

   Software Engineer, Microsoft

   Software engineering at Microsoft since February 2025.

3. 2023 – 2025

   Software Developer II, Amazon Web Services

   Worked on AWS CloudFormation, improving the service and the experience of the customers who define their infrastructure as code with it.

   Java · Kotlin · AWS · Infrastructure as code

4. 2022 – 2023

   Software Developer, Morgan Stanley

   Developed APIs and worked with cross-functional teams to build solutions for financial clients.

   APIs · Financial services

5. May 2021 – 2021 · Montreal, QC

   AI Software Developer, Intact Lab

   Built a Spring microservice that monitors Kafka messages, plus Python tooling on top of MongoDB and AWS S3.

   Java · Spring · Kafka · Python · MongoDB · AWS · APIs · Financial services

6. Sep 2020 – Dec 2020 · Montreal, QC

   Java Software Developer, Intact Financial Corporation

   Designed and built RESTful web services in Spring and Quarkus.

   Java · Spring · Quarkus · APIs · Financial services

7. May 2019 – Aug 2019 · Montreal, QC

   Full Stack Developer, Matrox Electronic Systems

   Built the web app the QA team used to manage its inventory.

   Web

8. 2017 – 2021 · Montreal, QC

   B.Eng. Software Engineering, Concordia University

   Software engineering degree, with internships in between. Along the way: an OpenGL game, a peer-to-peer video streaming capstone, a React Native campus map and a C++ board-game engine.

   Java · C++ · Python · OpenGL · Web

9. Origin

   Born in London, Ontario

Publications

1. IROS 2026

   SLAM Adversarial Lab: An Extensible Framework for Visual SLAM Robustness Evaluation under Adverse Conditions

   Mohamed Hefny, Karthik Dantu, Steven Y. Ko

2. arXiv preprint · 2026

   SLAMSqueezeBench: Comparing SLAM Systems under Resource Constraints

   Mohamed Hefny, Karthik Dantu, Steven Y. Ko

3. SecureDB @ SIGMOD 2026

   Estimating Power-Law Exponent with Edge Differential Privacy

   Adam Tan, Mohamed Hefny, Keval Vora

Google Scholar profile

Projects

• SLAM Adversarial Lab 2026

  Stress-tests visual SLAM two ways: degrade what the camera sees (fog, rain, night, a cracked lens) or the machine it runs on (CPU, memory and GPU caps, frame deadlines), across fourteen SLAM backends. IROS 2026.

  Python · Podman / Docker · CUDA

• Switchboard 2020–21

  Web service for peer-to-peer video streaming between senders and receivers. Concordia capstone project.

  Java · Spring Boot · React · MySQL · team of 9

• SuperHypercube 2021

  OpenGL remake of Super Hypercube: rotate a shape so it fits through the hole in an oncoming wall. Shadows, textures and a soundtrack.

  C++ · OpenGL · team of 6

• Montreal Crime Analytics 2020

  A* search for the safest walk across Montreal, over a grid built from the city's crime data, with an admissible diagonal heuristic.

  Python · GeoPandas · A*

• Post Classifier 2020

  Naive Bayes classifier that sorts Hacker News posts into story, ask_hn, show_hn and poll, at over 80% accuracy on 5,000 test posts.

  Python · pandas · NLTK

• Eight-Minute Legends 2021

  A complete C++ implementation of the board game Eight-Minute Empire: Legends.

  C++ · team of 5

• CONPASS 2020

  Campus map app with indoor directions through Concordia's buildings. Mini-capstone project.

  React Native · JavaScript

• This map 2021–26

  The page you're on: Gaussian splats, point clouds and a pose graph, rendered in your browser.

  TypeScript · Next.js · three.js · WebGL