MS and PhD Opportunities

Thanks for your interest! We are recruiting motivated MS/MPhil and PhD students to work at the intersection of future Internet architectures and intelligent edge systems. Our group focuses on turning rigorous ideas into deployable, reproducible systems for Pakistan and beyond.

What we work on 

We welcome applicants excited about one or more of the following areas (you don’t need to match all):

• Digital Twins (DT) for networked systems: DT-driven monitoring, what-if simulation, and control for UAV/IoT and smart city/agriculture scenarios.

• Federated & Reinforcement Learning at the edge: FDRL for task offloading, service migration, and scheduling under mobility/energy constraints.

• Semantic-aware communication: redundancy control, novelty gating, and fidelity control for visual/IoT streams.

• Future Internet architectures: NDN/ICN and SDN for vehicular and mobile IoT; secure, efficient forwarding/caching.

• Systems + security for fog/edge: lightweight security, robustness, and trustworthy evaluation across the DT–edge–cloud stack.

• Testbeds & reproducibility: building open, realistic evaluations (e.g., NS-3, Unity + Azure Digital Twins, public datasets).

Recent umbrellas: UAV-Edge DT for smart agriculture and transport, vehicular NDN broadcast/timing resilience, semantic duplication control, energy-aware offloading, FedUAV-TwinBench style testbeds.

Who should apply 

Strong candidates typically have a background in CS/EE/SE with strengths in some of:

• Systems and networking, distributed systems, operating systems

• Machine learning (especially RL/FL), optimization, probability/statistics

• Practical software skills (Python/C++), Linux, Docker; experience with PyTorch/TF a plus

• Simulation/emulation (NS-3), and (nice-to-have) Unity and Azure Digital Twins

• Clear, careful technical writing and an interest in open, reproducible research

What we look for 

Curiosity, integrity, and build-it-and-measure-it energy. Evidence can include a well-maintained GitHub, thoughtful project repos, reproducible experiments, or publications (workshops/conferences/journals). Experience with UAVs, sensing, NDN/SDN, RL/FL, or DT tools is a bonus, not a requirement.

How to apply

1. Fill this short form: application form. 

2. If your interests align, I’ll invite a pre-application package (single PDF) with:

• CV, and transcripts

• A well-thought-out research proposal (1–2 pages)

• Sample Publications 

• Names/emails of two references

If you’re already at UCP (Faculty of Information Technology and Computer Science, FOIT&CS) and want to do your PhD, MS, or final-year project in these areas, email at ahmad.arslan@ucp.edu.pk to set up a meeting.