Starfish-FL team lunch as Farhan Abbas returns to Calgary

The Starfish-FL team gathered for lunch in Calgary on September 1, 2026, marking Farhan Abbas’s return to the city after a one-year internship in Vancouver. Kaue Duarte, Yunkai Bao, Gerry Wu, and Dr. Steve Drew joined him at the table. It was the first time anyone in the group had met Farhan in person, after a full year of designing and shipping the same codebase across video calls and pull requests.

That year of remote work produced Starfish-FL: Harnessing Agentic Federated Analytics, published in ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, and the open source framework behind it at github.com/denoslab/starfish-fl. The team is interdisciplinary, drawing on electrical and software engineering, clinical neurosciences, and community health sciences, which is what let the project put a multi-tier agent harness in front of federated healthcare analytics without asking clinicians and biostatisticians to change the tools they already work in.

Farhan now heads into his final year as an undergraduate with ten courses to take across the next two semesters. Good luck, Farhan, and we look forward to more publications and more software from this team.