Topic: Web 3.0 : the future of Internet
Dr. Javed AHMED is professor at the Computer Science Department of Sukkur IBA University. He completed a postdoc from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2020. He was awarded an ERCIM fellowship for conducting postdoctoral research. He also completed dual Ph.D. degrees in 2017 on an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. During his PhD, he successfully completed his mobility as research scholar to following Universities: University of Bologna, the University of Turin, Autonoma de Barcelona Universitat, and University of Luxembourg. Prior to this, Prof. Ahmed was awarded a EURECA scholarship from European Commission in 2009 to conduct short-term research at the University of Paderborn, Germany. He also completed MS in Computer Science from the National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences, Karachi, in 2007.
Prof. Ahmed has vast research and collaboration experience with European Universities. He has been successful in forming Erasmus+ CBHE RAPID consortium of ten universities. The consortium is awarded funding from European Commission to develop policy and infrastructure for online education in Pakistan. NORPACT CONNECT is another success story of research collaboration between Computer Science Department of Sukkur IBA University and NTNU, Norway. This project is funded by Norwegian research council and under this project applied computer science curricula will be developed for master’s degree program.
Prof. Ahmed has vast teaching experience. He has been associated with Sukkur IBA University since 2002. He also taught at IBA Karachi as a visiting faculty member from Fall 2006 to Fall 2008. He has more than 30 research publications. Prof. Ahmed has research interests in the following areas: Blockchain, GDPR, Data Protection & Privacy, Online Social Networks. Prof. Ahmed also has the status of being HEC Approved Supervisor. Prof. Ahmed’s contributions are recognized by Universities and Boards Department, Government of Sindh and he has been awarded best performance award during ceremony at provisional level.
Director Science & Technology, Department of Computer Sciences, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Topic: Pakistan the Next Frontier of Cyber Security: Challenges and Opportunities
Prof. Dr.Muazzam Khan received the Post Doc and PhD. From the School of Computing & Engineering, University of Missouri Kansas City, USA. He is serving as Tenured Professor Director Science & Technology, Director ICESO Chair Data Analytics/EC Dept. of Computer Sciences, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Director Campus STMU, Park Road Campus Shifa Tameer-e-Millat University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Topic: Human Factors Engineering: How Local Industry Can Improve Effectiveness and Efficiency
Prof. Dr. Muhammad Tanvir Afzal received the PhD degree with highest distinction in Computer Science from the Graz University of Technology, Austria, secured Gold medal in his M.Sc Computer Science from Quiad-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He has been associated with academia and industry at various levels for the last 20 years, and currently he is serving as Director and Professor, Shifa School of Computing and Director Campus at one of the largest campus of Shifa Tameer-e-Millat University at park Road Islamabad. Previously, he has served Namal Institute Mianwali as Director and Professor. He has served Capital University of Science and Technology, Islamabad as Professor, Associate Professor, and Assistant Professor of CS. Furthermore, he has served NESCOM, COMSATS University Islamabad, and JinTech Islamabad. He is also serving as editor-in-chief for reputed impact factor journal known as: Journal of Universal Computer Science. Dr. Afzal authored more than 125 research papers in leading journals and conferences in the field of Data Science, Information retrieval and visualization, Semantics, Digital Libraries, Artificial Intelligence and Scientometrics. He has authored two books and has edited two books in Computer Science. His cumulative impact factor is 125+, with citations over 1,500. He played pivotal role in making collaborations between STMU-JUCS, MAJU-JUCS, MAJU-IICM, and TUG-UNIMAS. He served as PhD symposium chair, session chair, finance chair, committee member, and editor of several IEEE, ACM, Springer, Elsevier international conferences and journals. Dr. Afzal conducted more than 100 curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities in the last 5 years including seminars, workshops, national competitions (ExcITeCup) and invited international and national speakers from Google, Oracle, IICM, IFIS, SEGA Europe etc. Under his supervision, more than 60 post grad students (MS and PhD) have defended their research theses successfully and a number of PhD and MS students are pursuing their research with him. He served as Master trainer and a program director at a national level training for a public sector organization in Pakistan on Human Factors Engineering and conducted the training of over 150 hours for experts from the industry. He is the recipient of multiple international research fundings.
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) , NUST Director of Information Processing and transmission Research Group
Topic: The 6G Wireless Network: What to Expect and How to Incept?
Syed Ali Hassan (Senior Member, IEEE) received the M.S. degree in mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA, and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His broader area of research is signal processing for communications. He was a Research Associate with Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, CA, USA. He is currently a Professor with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), NUST, where he is also the Director of the Information Processing and Transmission Research Group, which focuses on various aspects of theoretical communications. He has (co)authored more than 250 publications in international conferences and journals and has organized several special issues/sessions as editor/chair in leading journals/conferences. He is also the CTO of Adept Tech Solutions, a US-based start up having its R&D office in Pakistan, providing efficient solutions to engineering businesses.
Director National Center of Cyber Security Air University Islamabad, Pakistan
Topic: Pakistan the next frontier in Cyber Security
Associate Professor, Faculty of Engg. & CS, National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan
Topic: Large language Models: Vulnerabilities, Societal Impact, and Future Research
Dr. Basit Shahzad received his M.Sc. degree from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan, and his Ph.D. from the University Technology Petronas, Malaysia. Dr. Basit Shahzad is, and has been working as a ‘Visiting Scientist’ at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, U.K. Dr. Shahzad has served as an Assistant Professor at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad and at King Saud University, Riyadh. Dr. Basit Shahzad has served as Dean Faculty of Engineering and Computer Sciences at National University of Modern Languages (NUML), Islamabad and is currently serving NUML as Director of Center for Multidisciplinary Research. Dr. Shahzad has also served as a consultant to the Election Commission of Pakistan. He has numerous publications in journals and conferences of international repute and has a very active research profile. Dr. Basit Shahzad is world’s most cited researcher in the area of Software Risk Management and has a cumulative impact factor of over 130. He has editorial role in several journals of high repute and has edited a number of special issues in the areas of software engineering, social networks, and mobile healthcare. His research and teaching career spans over 20 years. His current areas of research include Social Computing, Blockchain-based digital initiatives, Software Requirements Engineering, and Quantum Software Engineering.
Associate Professor of Computer Science , LUMS
Topic: Data-Driven Pathways to Digital Development:Using Big Data for Bridging the Digital Divides
Dr. Ihsan Ayyub Qazi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and a Principal Investigator at the National Center in Big Data & Cloud Computing (NCBC). He was the Chair of the LUMS Computer Science Department from 2018-2021 and is a recipient of several prestigious awards including the Google Faculty Research Award, three Meta/Facebook Integrity Foundational Research Awards, ACM SIGCOMM CCR Best Paper Award, and the Sheth International Young Alumni Achievement Award 2021 from the University of Pittsburgh, USA. His current research centers on digital development, countering misinformation and lack of data privacy using computational social science, machine learning and causal inference, and designing architectures, protocols, and applications for large-scale edge datacenters. He has led several large-scale transdisciplinary projects on bridging digital divides with a focus on digital literacy, connectivity and access, and affordability. His recent work has included designing evidence-based educational and technological interventions for countering fake news (including deepfake misinformation) among low digital literacy populations, making the Web more affordable and inclusive for users in developing regions, illuminating the impacts of information controls, and developing privacy-preserving machine learning approaches. He was a visiting Research Scientist at the University of California at Berkeley in 2017 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Associate Professor Tenured, Information Technology University, Lahore, Pakistan
Topic: Is Economics From Afar Domain Generalizable? Combining Machine Learning & Satellite Imagery to understand Economic Wellbeing
Mohsen Ali is an Associate Professor at Information Technology University (ITU) and a co-founder of the Intelligent Machines Lab. His main areas of research are Computer Vision and Deep Learning. His current interest is in designing machine learning algorithms that require less labeled data and are more interpretable. Mohsen has been pursuing a multi-disciplinary problem of understanding urbanization and economic condition by combining information from satellite imagery analysis and geospatial datasets. He is interested in using machine learning and computer vision to collect large datasets that capture bio-diversity, culture, and history to create an informative, self-growing, and in-depth map of Pakistan.
Mohsen’s work has been published in respectable computer vision, machine learning, and remote sensing venues, such as CVPR, NeurIPS, ECML, ICCV, ECCV, ISPRS-JPRS, etc. He has served as reviewer for CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ISPRS-JPRS, etc., and as an area chair for CVPR 2023 & NeurIPS 2023.
He has been awarded Google Research Scholar Award, as PI, to study if ‘Economics from Afar is domain generalizable?’. As co-PI, he has won funding such as a CV4GC grant from Facebook for detecting malaria from microscopic images, AI For Earth Initiative grant from National Geographic & Microsoft to study glacial lakes outburst floods, and a grant from ETRI for 3D scene reconstruction. Prior to joining ITU in 2014, Mohsen Ali obtained a doctorate from the University of Florida. He is a Fulbright alumnus and he is currently advising the Computer Vision and Machine Learning group at ITU.
Chairman at Department of IT and Computer Science, Pak-Austria Fachhochschule: Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology, Pakistan.
Topic: Edge Computing in Cloud Computing: Challenges and Opportunities
Babar Nazir is serving as Associate Professor and Chairman at Department of IT and Computer Science, Pak-Austria Fachhochschule: Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology, Pakistan. He obtained his Ph. D in Computer Science from the Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Malaysia. He received his M.S in Computer Science from the COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan. He received the COMSATS University Islamabad merit scholarship award and Universiti Teknologi Petronas Malaysia merit scholarship award for pursuing his MS and Ph.D studies respectively. He has more than 20 years of teaching and research experience at university level in reputed National and International organizations with more than 12 years of post-PhD experience. He has delivered keynote talks and presentations at International conferences and universities. He has published research articles in reputed journals/conferences, and edited/co-authored multiple book chapters. Moreover, he has completed renowned projects funded by Directorate of Science and Technology KPK, Higher Education Commission Pakistan, and National ICT R & D Fund Pakistan. Currently, he is on Editorial board/technical review panel of many renowned journals which includes: IEEE Access, Elsevier Journal of Network and Computer Applications, Elsevier Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Springer Journal of Supercomputing, Springer Journal of Computing, Springer Journal of Cluster Computing, KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems, and Elsevier Journal of Future Generation Computer Systems. Moreover, he is a member of steering Committee Member/ PC Chair/ Track Chair/ Technical Program Committee (TPC) member of different international conferences. He is approved PhD supervisor for Higher Education Commission Pakistan and supervised numerous MS/PhD research thesis. He also serves as a domain expert for multiple research funding bodies, namely: Best IT Innovation Award, Directorate of Science and Technology KPK Pakistan and HEC Pakistan. Moreover, he has served as a publication co-chair in the organizing committee of national-level IEEE conference namely: Frontiers of Information Technology, 2014. He has presented at multiple scientific venues internationally. His work has been presented and received recognition in many national events which includes: VisionICT best project award, IEEE International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology, DoST project exhibition, and Technomoot research poster. For his extensive research contribution, he has consistently been awarded CUI research productivity award for ten continuous years. In 2014, he was nominated for the HEC best teacher award by CUI. He has received CUI best researcher award in 2018. Some of his publications have appeared among the most downloaded articles in the Elsevier International Journal of Computers and Electrical Engineering, and Elsevier International Journal of Network and Computer Applications.
University of Balochistan, Quetta Pakistan
Topic: ChatGPT: Threats and Opportunities
Waheed Noor received the Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Science (PGD-CS) and Master in Computer Science (MCS) from University of Balochistan (UoB), Pakistan, and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand. Since 2005, he is with University of Balochistan in the Department of Computer Science and currently serving as Assistant Professor of Computer Science. He is also the Director of CERBM and GIL at UoB since 2019 where the researchers are provided opportunities in transforming their knowledge and experience for the good of society. Besides, having numerous published articles in well recognized journals and individual R&D projects have worth around 267+ Million from different national and international funding agencies, he is well known for his innovative skills and entrepreneurial mindset that helped into the transformation of number of lab research work into innovative products and mentored 100s of young innovators. Leading from the front, he already has filed one patent and finalizing couple of more for filing. His research interests lie in machine learning, data mining and knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence, generative and probabilistic modelling, and decision-theoretic problem solving. Dr. Noor also established ORIC, NIC under NEP, and started Digibizz and NFTP programs at UoB.
CEO and Founder Devsinc.
Topic: Revolutionizing Industries through AI-Powered innovation: Embracing the Future
