Prof. Dr. Karsten Berns

University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

Head of Research Group in Robot Systems

Prof. Dr. Karsten Berns received his PhD from the University of Karlsruhe in 1994. As head of the IDS (Interactive Diagnosis and Service Systems) department of the FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe (till 2003) he examined adaptive control concepts for different types of service robots. Since 2003 he is a full professor at the University of Kaiserslautern.

His present research activities are realization of reliable, complex autonomous robotic systems. The main application area is off-road robotics, in which autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles like small trucks, excavators, harvesters, tractors, and rescue robots are under development.

Prof. Berns is a member of the IEEE, the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) and the CLAWAR Association. He is a member of the executive committee of the German Robotics Association (DGR) and is leader of the technical committee for robotic systems of the GI. He has also served as a Dean of the department of computer science at the University of Kaiserslautern (2007-2010). Currently, he is the spokesperson of the Center for Commercial Vehicle Technology (ZNT) at the University of Kaiserslautern.

Dr. M. Haroon Yousaf

PI, NCRA Lab

Professor, UET, Taxila.

Muhammad Haroon Yousaf is currently working as a Professor of Computer Engineering at University of Engineering and Technology Taxila. He is the Director of Swarm Robotics Lab under National Centre of Robotics & Automation (NCRA). His areas of interest are computer vision and robotics. He has active research collaboration in UK, Germany and South Africa. He has supervised around 30 M.Sc. research thesis and 03 PhD scholars. He has completed many funded research/industry projects. He is also serving as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems on Video Technology (TCSVT). He is the recipient of Best University Teacher Award by Higher Education Commission for the years 2012-2013.

Dr. Mian Muhammad Awais

Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS Lahore

Dr. Awais received his Ph.D. from Imperial College, University of London. Prior to joining LUMS, Dr Awais conducted European Union research and development projects for a UK based SME. His Ph.D. work related to the development of on-line models for parametric estimation of solid fuel-fired industrial boilers. Dr Awais has also conducted research work on a class of iterative methods pertinent to Krylov subspaces for optimisation, such as the oblique projection and implicitly restarted model reduction methodologies.

Dr. Yasar Ayaz

Professor

School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering (SMME), NUST

Dr. Yasar Ayaz holds a PhD specializing in Robotics & Machine Intelligence from Tohoku University, Japan and is currently the Chairman / Central Project Director of National Center of Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) of Pakistan. He is also the Head of Department of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering (SMME) of National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. Furthermore, he has been awarded with honorary title of Specially-Appointed Associate Professor by Tohoku University, Japan. In addition, he is the Founder and President of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society of Pakistan and Deputy Chairman of the National Technology Foresight Panel on Robotics at the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology (PCST)

In May, 2014 Dr. Yasar was conferred with President’s Gold Medal by President of Pakistan for being the Overall Best Teacher of NUST which is the highest performance award of NUST that is given on the basis of overall teaching performance. Dr. Yasar has also been featured in Who's Who in the World, Berkeley, USA as a leading International Researcher and Academician since 2013 to present. He has also been named among the Top 100 Educators of the World by the International Biographical Center of Cambridge, UK. In March, 2017 the National Academy of Young Scientists (NAYS) Pakistan has also named Dr. Yasar Ayaz as one of the Top 20 Most Eminent Scientists of Pakistan.

Dr. Arif Mahmood

Professor and Chairperson

Department of Computer Science, ITU Lahore

Dr Arif Mahmood is currently a Professor of Computer Science, Director Computer Vision Lab and Controller of Examination at Information Technology University, Lahore, Pakistan. He has also worked as “Computer Vision Consultant” with King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China in 2021. Before joining ITU, he served as a Research Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and later at the School of Mathematics and Statistics in University of the Western Australia from 2012-2015. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at the Punjab University College of Information Technology from 2008-2012. He also worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the College of Engineering in Qatar University from 2015-2018. In 2015 he successfully authored Linkage Project grant from Australian Research Council (ARC): “Machine Learning for Fracture Risk Assessment from Simple Radiography” with industry partners.

He has excellent teaching and research experience at several national and international Universities. He has also conducted a three-day seminar course in 2021 on Computer Vision research in Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, China. He was Program Committee member in FIT 2017 and in International Workshop on “Robust Subspace Learning and Applications in Computer Vision” in conjunction with ICCV 2017, ICCV 2019, and ICCV2021. His major research interests include data clustering, classification, action and object recognition using image sets. He has also worked on computation elimination algorithms for fast template matching, video compression, object removal and image mosaicking. At the School of Mathematics and Statistics UWA, he worked on community detection in complex networks.

Dr. Riaz Uddin

Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Director ORIC, NED-UET Karachi.

Principal Investigator (PI) / Director of Haptics, Human-Robotics and Condition Monitoring Lab (affiliated with NCRA)

He is the inventor of Predictive Energy Bounding Algorithm (EBA) for Stable & Transparent Haptic Teleoperation Control and published the state-of-the-art systematic review for Predictive Teleoperation Control Approaches. He is also a very active reviewer of reputed journals from IEEE, Elsevier and Springer.

He has more than 66 national/international publications to his name in reputed Journals/conferences/book. “He (along with his team) recently designed low-cost ventilator (NED-Ventilator) in this COVID-19 pandemic, whose initial progress was covered by International & multiple Local Media such BBC world, BBC Urdu, Dunya News, 92 News, 24 News, ARY, GTV, Hum TV along with official social media platforms FB/Youtube etc.

Dr. Ali Raza

Associate Professor, Dept. of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, UET Lahore

Dr. Raza is serving as Associate Professor in the department of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Lahore, Pakistan. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin, on immunity-based heterogeneous robotic systems; prior to that, he did his master's in Mechatronics Engineering from UET Lahore and bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering from NUST Pakistan.

His primary research interests revolve around human-centered mechatronics. He heads the Human-Centered Robotics Lab of the National Center for Robotics and Automation (NCRA), Pakistan where collaborative robots, industrial exoskeletons, active prostheses and assistive devices are being developed. He has also developed bio-inspired algorithms especially towards the artificial immune systems including a multi-tier immunological framework for robotic systems to handle robot-heterogeneity and reconfigurability.

Research Interest:

• ·Artificial Immune Systems

• ·Robot Intelligence

• ·Human-Centered Robotics

• ·Bio-Centered Mechatronics

Dr. Anayat Ullah

Assistant Professor

Electronic Engineering Department

BUITEMS Quetta

Dr. Anayatullah is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering. He holds a PhD in Engineering and an MS in Electrical Communication Engineering from University of Kassel, Germany. He is the Principal Investigator of Control Automotive and Robotics Lab (CARL) under the National Center of Robotics and Automation (NCRA). He has also served as the Director, Office of Research, Innovation and Commercialization at Balochistan University of IT Engineering and Management Sciences (BUITEMS) and Chairperson Electronic Engineering Department there. Dr. Anayat Ullah specializes in fabrication and mechanical and optical optimization of MEMS and Nanoimprinted sensors. Recently, he has focused more on application of Machine Learning Algorithms in the mathematical modeling of optical systems such as Photonic Crystals. Currently, his lab is focused on Learning based Control Algorithms and Data Analytics using Machine Learning.

Dr. Hashim Raza Khan

Assistant Professor

Department of Electronic Engineering

NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi

Dr. Hashim Raza Khan brings in years of experience in electronics design. He has worked on instrumentation and calibration systems at Agilent Technologies, Germany (now Keysight) as well as at Infineon Technologies, Germany on designing integrated circuits for mobile phones. For the last three years, he is also heading a successful commercial venture within a public sector organization offering repair, calibration, training and engineering services for local industry. The idea was conceived and implemented by him in fully bootstrap mode.

Dr. Mudassir Hussain

Assistant Professor

Department of Electronic Engineering, FICT, BUITEMS, Quetta, Pakistan.

Expertise and Interest in Applications Specific Digital and Analog Integrated Circuits and System and following sub branches:

• Low Power Analog/Digital Integrated Electronics

• Embedded System

• Low Power SoC for Biomedical Applications/Surgical Robots

• Digital Image Processing

Proficient in Cadence IC design Virtuoso tools including Design Rule Check (DRC)/ Layout Verses Schematic (LVS). Place and Route Layout cell from block level to chip level of Analog/Digital VLSI circuit from beginning to tape out.

Dr. Umair Mateen Khan

Engineering Manager AI

ILSA Interactive, Lahore

Dr. Umair is an artificial intelligence expert with a passion for making data more meaningful. His areas of expertise include machine learning, statistical modeling, deep learning, computer vision and data science. He did his PhD from Otago New Zealand. He has worked at Engro Digital as Data Science Lead for a few years.

Dr. Syed Atif Mehdi

Director, Center of Robotics

Assistant Professor, University of Central Punjab, Lahore.

Syed Atif Mehdi received his Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from FAST National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan in the year 2001. After completing BS, he joined NetSol as a "Software Engineer". Afterwards, he completed his Master in Computer Science Degree with specialization in artificial intelligence from FAST National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. He served as a lecturer at University of Management and Technology till 2007.

He was awarded scholarship by Higher Education Commission of Pakistan to pursue his PhD from Germany in the year 2007. He joined the Robotics Research Lab in October 2007 and completed his PhD in the year 2014. During his PhD, his focus was on learning the presence of an elderly person in the home environment using daily routine of the person. Afterwards, he worked as a Post-Doc in the group and was responsible for the development of an autonomous Oct-copter that can perform various inspection tasks. Currently he is employeed at University of Central Punjab.

Dr. Yasir Niaz Khan

Director, Research Group on Robotics & AI

Assistant Professor, The University of Lahore, Lahore.

Dr. Yasir Niaz Khan obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Tubingen in 2013. During his Ph.D. he conducted research on detection of terrain (ground surfaces) using a camera mounted on a flying and a ground robot. Upon completing his graduate studies, Dr. Khan started teaching robotics at FAST-NU, Lahore, Pakistan. He started a new robotics Lab at FAST-NU for robotics students to promote robotics in Pakistan. Dr. Khan supervised many national and international level robotic events held at FAST-NU where professors and students from different universities presented their works in robotics field. Dr. Khan joined The University of Lahore, the largest private sector university in Pakistan, and has started to extend his work further. He is now Director of Research Group on Robotics and IoT that he established at the university. He is also involved in a project on Agricultural Automation for the 3 years funded by DAAD Germany. The project includes visits to and from Germany of Pakistani and German researchers every year. He has been working as a consultant with Engro Corp, etc. For more information on Prof. Khan's work visit www.yasirniaz.com

Axel Vierling

Researcher, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

Axel Vierling started, after his A-levels in 2011, to study mathematics from 2011 till 2017 with the specialization "Modeling & Scientific Computing" at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. He completed his study with his master thesis “Markov Jump Linear Systems in Wireless Communication” in the Techno-mathematics group.

Since April 2017 Axel Vierling is a PhD-student in the Robotics Research Lab and since April 2018 he is a research associate. His main research interests are the intelligent perception of the environment via neural networks and especially possible verification approaches. Motivating applications are camera-based assistance systems in commercial vehicles. Here the main focus is the detection of persons from a birds-eye-view.

Eike Gassen

Researcher, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

Eike Gassen studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern in his bachelor's degree and mechanical engineering with applied computer science in his master's degree.

During his studies, he focused on robotics. In his project work, he dealt with the setup of a collaborative lightweight robot with Robot Operating System (ROS). The topic of his master thesis was the conceptual design of a vineyard robot in steep slope viticulture. In addition to the comparison of different kinematics concepts, a modular design of the entire robot was discussed in order to achieve the most extensive use in the vineyard. Gassen has been a member of staff at RRLab since September 2021. His research focus here is on innovative mechatronic systems in agriculture.

Jakub Pawlak

Researcher, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

Jakub Pawlak studied computer science at TU Kaiserslautern from 2014 to 2022 with a focus on robotics and artificial intelligence. His master's thesis entitled "Domain Adaptation from Synthetic Images to Real-World Scenario Using Generative Methods" dealt with the effective use of synthetic data in the context of Machine Learning.

Since 2022 he is Ph. D. candidate at the Chair of Robot Systems at TU and continues this research interest using generative deep learning methods like GANs and style transfer for robust perception in robotic systems. This includes efficient data generation and transfer of knowledge from the simulation into the real world.

Hamza Jan

Researcher, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

Qazi Hamza Jan did his Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Bahria University, Islamabad (BUI). His final year project was "pure sine-wave inverter using motor-gen pair". Later he did his masters in Electrical engineering from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) from 2013 to 2015. Topic of his thesis was "Visual Inertial Navigation for Odometry". He joined RRLab, Technical University of Kaiserslautern from April, 2018 as a PhD student. His research focuses on autonomous navigation using sensor fusion.