Biography

I received my BS degree in information technology (BIT) in 2008 from University of Peshawar, KPK, Pakistan. I was awarded fellowship from department of computer science, CCIS, King Saud University as Researcher Assistant since February 2009 till December 2012 where I worked in Visual Computing Lab (VCL) and completed my MS(CS) degree focusing on category based feature extraction/selection for face recognition. Beside thesis, I also worked on other research projects. 

I was awarded full PhD scholarship by University of Milan, Italy in 2013. I joined CVPR lab University of Naples Parthenope under supervision of Prof. Alfredo Petrosino and started working on designing of deep neural network architectures. My research mainly focuses on imposing pyramidal structures in NN for reducing number of parameters and enhancing performance. During my PhD I received the opportunity to work as a visiting researcher at CVGL Lab Stanford in 2015. Where I worked under supervision of Prof. Silvio Saverese and Dr. Amir Zamir. In addition, I had the chance to attend several conferences, workshops, and deep learning summer schools. 

I was IEEE student member as well as member of GIRPR (Gruppo Italiano Ricercatori in Pattern Recognition). Previously, I was a member of Saudi Computer Society. 

I was working as a Senior Post-Doctoral Researcher in Data Mining & Machine Learning Group, College of Engineering & Informatics and INSIGHT Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland Galway. My role was of Project Manager for H2020 Project called ROCSAFE. 

Following that, I was working as a Research Fellow in CeADAR Ireland's National Centre for Applied AI & Data Analytics at Technological University (TU) Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. My role was as a Project Manager (Internal CeADAR Projects in Collaboration with Industry and EI Innovation Partnership Projects)  and to work on Proposals for local and international funds (e.g. SFI, H2020). Than I was promoted to Sr Research Data Scientist in CeADAR Ireland's National Centre for Applied AI & Data Analytics at University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.  Where, I was the Head of Special Projects Group. I was working on writing proposals in local and international funding calls (e.g. SFI, Horizon Europe, DTIF, IPP) as well as I was the technical lead and technical lead and expert for solving SMEs AI related problems.

Currently, I am working as Assistant Professor (Lecturer Above the Bar) in School of Computer Science, University of Galway, Ireland.  

I support slow science. 

PhD Thesis:

A Pyramidal Approach for Designing Deep Neural Network Architectures

MS(CS) Thesis: 

Feature Extraction / Selection for Category Specific Face Recognition Based on Gender Classification