My Journey

From Pakistan to South Korea, and now Australia — my path has been about building secure, adaptive, and human‑aligned AI step by step, mentor by mentor, and project by project.

Milestones

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science — FAST‑NU (Islamabad, Pakistan)
  Foundations in algorithms, systems, and software engineering.

• Master’s in Computer Science — Sangmyung University (Cheonan, South Korea)
  Supervised by Prof. Heemin Park. I started exploring applied machine learning, laying the groundwork for my later focus on trustworthy AI.

• Ph.D. in Computer Science — SUNY Korea, Stony Brook University and Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea)
  Conducted at DASH Lab under Prof. Simon S. Woo. This was the turning point: I moved deeply into AI security, deepfake & generative media forensics, and time‑series anomaly detection for complex systems. Worked on full‑stack research: data collection and curation, model design, benchmarking, and open‑sourcing reproducible code—habits I’ve kept ever since.

• Postdoctoral Fellow → Research Scientist — CSIRO’s Data61 (Sydney, Australia)
  With the Collaborative Intelligence Future Science Platform (CINTEL FSP), I focused on human‑AI teaming for cybersecurity. Today, I’m building detection methods and decision frameworks that perform in the wild and work with people, not around them.

What shaped my research

Each step introduced a new facet of the same question: How do we make AI robust, generalizable, and genuinely useful to people?

• Generalizable detection — From early fake‑face forensics to multimodal deepfake datasets, I’ve focused on detectors that keep working under domain shift and unseen attacks.

• Continual & lifelong learning — I design methods that adapt with limited data and minimal retraining, mitigating catastrophic forgetting while preserving prior knowledge.

• Human‑AI collaboration — In high‑stakes settings like SOCs, I co‑develop frameworks that reduce alert fatigue and improve decision quality by blending automation, augmentation, and collaboration.

Mentors & collaborators

I’ve been fortunate to learn from and work with outstanding mentors and teammates, including Prof. Heemin Park, Prof. Simon S. Woo, and colleagues at CSIRO’s Data61. Their guidance continues to shape how I ask questions, design studies, and translate research into practice.

Recognition & service

• Finalist, Australian AI Awards 2025 — AI Rising Star of the Year (Enterprise).

• Awards at CSIRO (e.g., SCS Biannual Award; Best Poster at CTDiS).

• Program committee/reviewer service across major venues (AAAI, NeurIPS, KDD, ICLR, CVPR, WWW, CIKM, SDM, etc.).