About

Bio: 

Dr. Syed Afaq Shah is a Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University (ECU) and Adjunct Senior Lecturer (Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering), the University of Western Australia (UWA), Perth. His research interests include artificial intelligence, computer vision, image processing,  machine learning, pattern recognition, scene understanding, and robotics. He has established and leads the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Research (RAIR) lab. Prior to joining ECU, he worked as a Lecturer at Murdoch University (2018 to 2021) and Lecturer ICT at Central Queensland University (2018). He received his PhD degree from UWA and later worked as a Research Fellow for 2.5 years at UWA. He was holder of the most competitive Australian scholarships, which include Scholarship for International Research Fee (SIRF), Research Training Scheme (RTS) and UWA Top-Up scholarship. Afaq has developed machine learning systems and various feature extraction/matching algorithms for 3D object recognition and reconstruction. Prior to his enrolment at the University of Western Australia, he has worked for seven years as Project Manager and later Deputy Chief Engineer (Information Technology) and Deputy Director Quality Assurance in the aviation industry. His excellent time, staff and project management skills helped him to meet all deadlines and improve various data/document handling procedures in the organization. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in electrical engineering. He is Australian Computer Society Certified Professional.

Research: 

Afaq Shah’s main field of research and expertise is “Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing”. He develops advanced machine learning techniques for image/video/data analysis, scene understanding, health (e.g., prediction of cardiovascular and Alzheimer disease), agricultural monitoring, medical/bio-medical applications, environmental sustainability measures, remote sensing, security, surveillance and monitoring. He has significantly contributed in machine learning, 3D feature descriptors, 3D object recognition and reconstruction, image segmentation, biometrics,  2D-3D scene understanding, and classification, human computer interaction, 2D-3D action and gesture recognition, image captioning, and health analytics. He has published over 40 research papers in high impact factor journals including IJCV, IEEE TNNLS, Pattern Recognition and reputable conferences including NeurIPS and ECCV. He has also co-authored a book, "A Guide to Convolutional Neural Networks for Computer Vision". He has been awarded over $350,000 in different competitive research funding schemes.

Media Coverage

1. Channel 7 news provided coverage to our project, '3D face Analysis System for Facial Rejuvenation'

2. UWA media news release

3. My interview with SBS Urdu service Australia

Academic Services

1. Associate Editor - Network: Computation in Neural Systems

2. Associate Editor - Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence

3. Guest Editor – Neurocomputing (Vision Transformers and Graph-based Models for Human Activity Understanding)

4. Guest Editor - Remote Sensing Journal

5. AJCAI (35th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) 2022 Workshop Chair

6. DICTA (The International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications) 2021 Workshop and Special Session Chair

7. PSIVT (Pacific-Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology) 2019 Workshop Organiser

Afaq reviews papers for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, Pattern Recognition (Elsevier), Journal of Real Time Image Processing (Springer), IEEE IET Image Processing Journal, IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) and Artificial Intelligence for Human Robot Interaction (AI- HRI).  

He also served as a Program Committee member for Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems (ACIVS2017), ACIVS2018, International Conference on Multimedia and Network Information Systems (MISSI2018) and ICCN 2015

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