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Successful PhD Public Defense by Ms. Solat Jabeen
Ms. Solat Jabeen Sheikh successfully defended her PhD Thesis, titled, On Building a Semi-Automated Framework for Constructing Bayesian Networks from Raw Text. Her research focused on developing a generalized framework for constructing Bayesian Networks from raw text, particularly in data-scarce domains.
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Proposal Defense of Mr. M. Adil Saleem
Mr. M. Adil Saleem successfully defended his PhD Proposal. His research focuses on designing an explainable treatment recommendation systems to leverage raw clinical notes effectively to generate treatments and corresponding explanations in resource-constrained healthcare settings.
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Robotics Workshop by Dr. Ali Raza on Fundamentals and ROS
Dr. Syed Ali Raza conducted a half-day workshop on "Exploring Robotics: Concepts, Challenges & Hands-On." The session covered robotics fundamentals including sensors, actuators, and hardware-software synergy; core challenges such as locomotion, localization, and human-robot interaction; and provided practical insights into Robot Operating System (ROS) with hands-on experience using the Gazebo simulator.
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Indus Hospital Team Visits AI Lab for AI in Healthcare Presentations
A delegation from Indus Hospital, led by Dean Dr. Zafar Zaidi and including ER Head Dr. Ghazanfar Saleem, visited IBA to meet with AI Lab MS and PhD students working on NLP applications in healthcare. Students presented their research on ICD-10 coding from clinical notes, treatment recommendation systems, medical question answering, and explainable AI for healthcare.
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Large Language Model Workshop by Dr. Sajjad Haider
Dr. Sajjad Haider conducted a workshop on Large Language Models for faculty members and PhD scholars. The session covered transformer architecture, attention mechanisms, pre-trained models, and the Hugging Face ecosystem for working with LLMs.
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Proposal Defense of Ms. Solat Jabeen
Ms. Solat Jabeen successfully defended her PhD Proposal. She is developing a generalized framework for converting raw text from data-scarce domains into probabilistic causal models and using thes models as decision support tools
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Proposal Defense of Ms. Sumaira Saeed
Ms. Sumaira Saeed successfully defended her PhD Proposal. She is working on finding semantically similar text items from free-form text written in English language and generating human-understandable explanations in natural language to explain why two text items are semantically similar
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Successful PhD Public Defense by Ms. Zarmeen Nasim
Ms. Zarmeen Nasim successfully defended her PhD Thesis, titled, On Building An Interpretable Clustering Approach For Urdu Language. Her research focused on clustering hort–length text written in Urdu language and generating semantically coherent labels of clusters.
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Successful PhD Public Defense by Mr. M. Usman Arif Mr. Usman Arif
Mr. M. Usman Arif successfully defended his PhD Thesis, titled, A Unified Framework for Multi-Robot Task Allocation. His research focused on designing a centralized task allocation framework be designed for effective (quality) and robust task allocation among a team of robots operating across multiple problem distributions (flexible) and environmental changes (online).
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IBA and Indus Hospital Sign MoU for Healthcare AI Research
IBA Karachi and the Indus Hospital and Health Network (IHHN) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a collaborative framework for healthcare research. The MoU, initiated by the AI Lab at IBA and the Emergency Department at Indus Hospital, aims to combine strengths in medical expertise and artificial intelligence to foster research, innovation, and product development benefiting patients in Pakistan and the region.
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IBA and AKU Sign MoU for AI-Driven Healthcare and Education Research
IBA Karachi and Aga Khan University (AKU) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on research and innovation in education and healthcare. The AI Lab at IBA was instrumental in making this partnership possible, which brings together expertise in machine learning and data analytics from both institutions to work on projects in healthcare, big data, and related areas. The collaboration opens opportunities for joint research, training programs, and shared mentorship for faculty, researchers, and students.
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Proposal Defense of Ms. Zarmeen Nasim
Ms. Zarmeen Nasim successfully defended her PhD Proposal. She is working on clustering short–length text written in Urdu language and generating semantically coherent labels of them
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Doctorate Degree Awarded to Ms. Asma Larik
Ms. Asma Larik was awarded her doctorate degree by IBA during the 2019 convocation. Her research in Strategy Optimization used RoboCup Soccer as a testbed, developing a framework that learns an opponent's strategy and optimizes the counter-strategy.
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Dr. Sajjad Haider Delivers Keynote at Pakistan Academy of Engineering
Pakistan Academy of Engineering organized a symposium on "Preparing for Our Digital Economy." Dr. Sajjad delivered a keynote on the future of Artificial Intelligence, alongside talks on IoT, Blockchain, and 5G.
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Dr. Quratulain Rajput Conducts Workshop on Social Network Analysis
A half-day workshop at the AI Lab covering fundamentals, applications, and hands-on exercises in social network analysis. Interactive session with Q&A.
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Dr. Sajjad Haider Visiting UTS as Senior Research Fellow for 6 Months
Dr. Sajjad Haider visited the University of Technology, Sydney for 6 months (July 2018 – January 2019), joining the Advanced Analytics Institute as a Senior Research Fellow. He worked primarily in the areas of automated machine learning, explainable AI, and cognitive robotics.
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Mr. M. Usman Arif Conducts Workshop on ROS
Mr. Usman Arif conducted a 2-day long workshop on Robot Operating System (ROS) at the AI Lab on 20th and 21st of April 2018. The workshop covered introduction, hands-on practices, and live demonstration of executing commands on TurtleBot.
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Dr. Sajjad Haider at Habib University's Public Lecture Series
Habib University organized a public lecture titled "Journey on Intelligence: A Dialogue where Philosophy inquires the Artificial Intelligence" on March 22, 2018. Dr. Sajjad Haider and Dr. Mohammad Haris discussed the rise of AI and how mankind will deal with new moral and ethical dimensions. The event was covered by Dawn newspaper. The video is available on Vimeo.
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Proposal Defense of Mr. Usman Arif
Mr. Usman Arif successfully defended his PhD Proposal on November 3, 2017. He is developing a generic framework to solve a variety of multi-robot task allocation problems (Single Task–Single Robot, Single Task–Multiple Robot, Multiple Tasks–Multiple Robots) for both instantaneous and extended time arrivals.
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Doctorate Degree Awarded to Ms. Saleha Raza
Ms. Saleha Raza was awarded doctorate degree by IBA during the 2015 convocation held in December 2015. Her work was in the area of Imitation Learning. She developed a learning-by-imitation framework and demonstrated its performance in RoboCup Soccer, where strategies learned by the framework outperformed hand-coded strategies.
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Karachi Chotu Secures 3rd Position at IranOpen RoboCup 2014
Karachi Chotu, Pakistan's first and only RoboCup @Home league team, won third position at IranOpen RoboCup 2014 held in Tehran, Iran. The team was among the 5 out of 11 teams that qualified for the competition, facing teams from Iran, China, and Germany. A remarkable achievement for a team less than one year old.
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Ali Raza Wins Full Scholarship to Pursue PhD at UTS
Mr. Ali Raza, a key resource of Karachi Koalas since Summer 2011, was awarded the UTS Presidents Scholarship to undertake a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney. He continued his work on Karachi Koalas while at UTS.
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Data Mining Workshop for Professionals
The AI Lab organized a 2-day data mining workshop for professionals on December 7–8, 2013. The workshop focused on providing basic data analytics techniques to business analysts, risk modelers, and market researchers. 18 participants attended from banks, financial institutions, NGOs, and government bodies.
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Robotics Workshop for High School Teachers
The AI Lab organized a 1-day robotics workshop for high school teachers on 29th November, 2013. A "train-the-trainer" program was attended by 17 teachers from 8 major schools in Karachi. Participants suggested a longer-duration program in the future.
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Geo TV Coverage of Karachi Koalas at World RoboCup 2013
Geo TV (Pakistan) broadcast two reports on Karachi Koalas directly from the competition site in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Video reports available: Report 1 | Report 2
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Karachi Koalas Ranked 5th at World RoboCup Soccer 2013
Karachi Koalas, the joint RoboCup Soccer team (3D Simulation League) of IBA and UTS Sydney, reached the Quarter Final stages of World RoboCup 2013 in Eindhoven, Netherlands, finishing 5th. Their ranking improved from Top 16 in 2011, to Top 10 in 2012, to 5th in 2013.
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Apr 2013 · Equipment
AI Lab Acquires 2nd NAO Robot via TWAS Research Grant
A new NAO Robot arrived at the AI Lab, obtained via a research grant from the Third World Academy of Science (TWAS), Italy. The lab now hosts 2 state-of-the-art NAO robots. These humanoid robots feature 25 degrees of freedom, HD cameras, 4 microphones, and a Linux-powered multimedia system.
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Karachi Koalas Win Two Awards at IranOpen 2013
Karachi Koalas participated in IranOpen 2013 in Tehran and won the Most Improved Team and Best Presentation awards.
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Saleha Raza Visiting Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, UK
Ms. Saleha Raza spent 3 months (Oct 2012 – Jan 2013) as a Research Intern at Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC), working with the Infer.NET team on probabilistic graphical models.
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Karachi Koalas Finish in the Top 10 at World RoboCup Soccer 2012
Karachi Koalas participated in World RoboCup 2012 in Mexico City and reached the Top 10 — up 6 ranks from 2011. During this journey, the team defeated CIT3D (China, Runner-up of 2011) and Socio3D (Japan). Their performance was also covered by Samaa TV: Samaa TV Coverage.
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Doctorate Degree Awarded to Quratulain Rajput
Ms. Quratulain Rajput was awarded doctorate degree by IBA during the 2011 convocation on December 2, 2011 — the first PhD not only of the AI Lab but of all of IBA. Her work is in the area of Semantic Web.
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Research Grant by ICT R&D Fund for Anti-Money Laundering Project
AI Lab won a research grant of Rs. 8.5 Million from the ICT R&D Fund of Pakistan to build an Anti-Money Laundering System in partnership with Credit-Chex, Inc. The grant supports 2 MS students and 1 PhD student for 18 months.
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Research Grant by Higher Education Commission (HEC)
AI Lab won a research grant of Rs. 2.5 Million from the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan to offer fully funded RA positions to 3 MS Students per year for 3 years, strengthening the Karachi Koalas team.
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AI Lab Receives NAO Robot Gift from UTS
AI Lab received a NAO Robot from the University of Technology, Sydney — a gift valued at 7,500 Euros. The autonomous humanoid robot features gyro, accelerometer, ultrasonic, and sound sensors, plus two cameras with facial and shape recognition capability.
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Karachi Koalas Among Top 16 Teams at World RoboCup 2011
Karachi Koalas finished among the top 16 teams in their debut World RoboCup in Istanbul, Turkey. The event was covered by Geo TV: Geo TV Coverage.
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RoboCup Soccer Team Established
AI Lab joined hands with the Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab at UTS to develop a RoboCup Soccer team in the 3D Simulation League, named "Karachi Koalas." The team aims to participate in Regional and World RoboCup Soccer competitions.
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Prototype of BNOSA Made Available Online
The prototype of BNOSA (Bayesian Network and Ontology based Semantic Annotation) was released on June 10, 2010. BNOSA is a semantic annotation framework that works on unstructured, ungrammatical, and incoherent web data sources.
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Version 1.0 of IBAyes Released
Version 1.0 of IBAyes was released on May 20, 2010. IBAyes is a probabilistic reasoning tool for modeling uncertain situations and performing inference using Bayesian Networks and Influence Nets.