News Events

Doctorate Degree Awarded to Ms Asma Larik (December 2019)

Ms. Asma Larik has been awarded doctorate degree by IBA during the 2019 convocation held in December 2019. Her work was in the area of Strategy Optimization. In her research, she used the domain of RoboCup Soccer as a testbed and developed a framework that learns an opponent's strategy and optimizes the counter-strategy.

Dr. Sajjad Haider delivered a KeyNote Speech at Pakistan Academy of Engineering Symposium (July 2019)

Pakistan Academcy of Engineering organized a Syposium on "Preparing for Our Digital Economy" on July 27, 2019. Dr. Sajjad delivered a keynote speech on the future of Artificial Intelligence. The symposium also included talks by eminent scholars on IoT, Blockchain, and Fifth Generation Wireless Technology (5G).

Dr. Quratulain Rajput conducted a workshop on Social Network Analysis (May 2018)

Dr Qurutulain Rajput conducted a social network analysis workshop at the AI Lab on 11th May 2018. The half-day workshop covered fundamentals of social network analysis, its applications and hands-on exercises to cover the essence of the Social Network Analysis field. It was an interact active session followed by questions and answers.

Dr. Sajjad Haider visiting AAI, UTS as a Senior Research Fellow for 6 months (May 2018)

Dr. Sajjad Haider is visiting the University of Technology, Sydney for 6 months (July 2018 - January 2019). He is joining the Advanced Analytics Institute as a Senior Research Fellow and will be primarily working in the areas of automated machine learning, explainable AI and cognitive robotics.

Mr. M. Usman Arif conducted a workshop on ROS (April 2018)

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, hand on practices and live demonstration of executing commands on turtle bot. It was an energizing bootup camp for aspiring researchers in the field of robotics.

Dr. Sajjad Haider participated in Habib University's Public Lecture Series (March 2018)

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 will mankind deal with new moral and ethical dimensions. The event was covered by the media and a detailed report was published in Dawn . The video of this insightful and interactive lecture series is available at Vimeo

Proposal Defense of Mr. Usman Arif (November 2017)

Mr. Usman Arif successfully defended his PhD Proposal on November 3, 2017. He is working on developing a generic framework to solve a variety of multi-robot task allocation problems, namely Single Task - Single Robot, Single Task - Multiple Robot, Multiple Tasks, Multiple Robots, etc. for both instantaneous and extended time arrivals.

Doctorate Degree Awarded to Ms Saleha Raza (December 2015)

Ms. Saleha Raza has been awarded doctorate degree by IBA during the 2015 convocation held in December 2015. Her work was in the area of Imitation Learning. In her research, she developed a learning-by-imitation framework and demonstrated its performance in the RoboCup Soccer domain where the strategies learned by the framework outperformed the hand-coded strategies.

Proposal Defense of Asma Larik (September 2015)

Ms. Asma Larik successfully defended her PhD Proposal on September 14, 2017. Her work is on optimizing opponent specific strategy in adversarial domains. She is using RoboCup Soccer as a testbed to develop a machine learning and evolutionary computation based framework that can identify an opponent in realtime during a match and execute the corresponding strategy optimized beforehand for the opponent type.

Karachi Chotu Secured 3rd Position in IranOpen RoboCup 2014 (April 2014)

Karachi Chotu, Pakistan's first and only RoboCup @Home league team, won third position in IranOpen RoboCup 2014 that was held in Tehran, Iran. The time was among the 5 teams (out of 11) that qualified for the competition. The other teams in the competition were from Iran, China and Germany. This is a remarkable achievement for a new team that is less than a year old.

Dr. Sajjad Haider's visit to UTS (Jan 2014)

Dr. Sajjad Haider is visiting University of Technology, Sydney for 2 months (Jan 2014 - Mar 2013). His visit focuses on advancing the research and development in RoboCup Soccer. In addition, he aims to initiate new joint projects in the emerging field of big data analytics.

Ali Raza joined won full scholarship to pursue PhD studies from UTS (Dec 2013)

Mr. Ali Raza, who has been working as an RA in the AI Lab since Summer 2011 and has been one of the key resource of Karachi Koalas, has been awarded UTS Presidents Scholarship to undertake a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney. Mr. Raza would continue his work on Karachi Koalas while at UTS.

Data Mining workshop for Professionals (Dec 2013)

The AI Lab organized a 2 day long data mining workshop for professionals on December 7-8, 2013. The workshop focused on providing basic data analytics techniques to business analyst, risk modelers, market researchers, etc. The workshop was attended by 18 participants from banks, other financial institutions, market research companies, government bodies, NGOs, etc. Mr. Nauman Sheikh, author of Implementing Analytics who is currently based in the US, also spoke to the participants via video conferencing.

Robotics Workshop for High School Teachers (Nov 2013)

The AI Lab organized a 1 day robotics workshop for high school teachers on 29th November, 2013. The workshop intended to provide "train-the-trainer" program as there is a lack of formal training in the area of educational robotics. The workshop was attended by 17 high school teachers from 8 major schools of Karachi. The program was highly appreciated by the participants and they suggested a longer duration program in the future.

AI Lab acquired a Turtle Bot (July 2013)

The AI Lab has acquired a TurtleBot robot. Turtlebots are an open robotics platform designed for education and research on state of art robotics. The robot's software is built upon ROS (Robot Operating System). Being equiped with a 3D sensor, it can map and navigate indoor enviroments. The 3D perception, together with the TurtleBot arm, enables manipulation tasks. he newly arrived robot has been obtained via a research grant provided by the Third World Academy of Science (TWAS), Italy.

Geo TV Coverage of Karachi Koalas during World RoboCup 2013 (June 2013)

Geo TV (Pakistan) broadcasted two reports on Karachi Koalas directly from the competition site. The videos are available at:
Report 1
Report 2

Karachi Koalas Ranked 5th at World RoboCup Soccer 2013 (June 2013)

Karachi Koalas, the joint RoboCup Soccer team (3D Simulation League) of Institute of Business Administration and University of Technology, Sydney, reached the Quarter Final stages of the World RoboCup 2013 and were ranked 5th in the tournament. The competition was held in Eindhoven, Netherlands during June 24-30, 2013. It's a very proud moment for us that the performance of KK is improving each year. In 2011, we were in the Top 16 group, then in 2012 we were in the Top 10 group (up 6 ranks from 2011) and now in 2013 we are ranked 5th in the world (up 5 ranks from 2012).

AI Lab got 2nd Nao Robot via TWAS Research Grant (April 2013)

A new Nao Robot has recently arrived in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, IBA. Nao robots are made in France and are the best humanoid robots available in the world. They are also used in the RoboCup Soccer Standard Platform League. These robots are equipped with an accelerometer, a gyrometer, and four ultrasonic sensors that provide them stability and positioning within space. They feature 25 degrees of freedom which allows them to produce human like walks and movements. In addition, they contain eight force-sensing resistors and two touch sensors.
They also have an onbaord Linux-powered multimedia system that includes four microphones (for voice recognition and sound localization), two speakers and two HD cameras for computer vision including facial and shape recognition. The newly arrived robot has been obtained via a research grant provided by the Third World Academy of Science (TWAS), Italy. The AI Lab now hosts 2 state-of-the-art Nao robots. The first one was provided by University of Technology, Sydney as a gift to the Artificial Intelligence Lab. These robots will be an immense help to our research students in advancing the field of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Robotics, specially they will provide a test bed to evaluate new algorithms in the field of machine learning, computer vision, imitation-based learning, computational intelligence and reinforcement learning.

Karachi Koalas Won Two Awards at IranOpen 2013 (April 2013)

Karachi Koalas, the joint RoboCup Soccer team (3D Simulation League) of Institute of Business Administration and University of Technology, Sydney, participated in IranOpen 2013 and won two awards: MOST IMPROVED TEAM award and BEST PRESENTATION award. The competition was held in Tehran on April 03-07, 2012.

Karachi Koalas Reached Quarter Finals of IranOpen 2013 (April 2013)

Karachi Koalas, the joint RoboCup Soccer team (3D Simulation League) of Institute of Business Administration and University of Technology, Sydney, participated in IranOpen 2013 reached the Quarter Finals of IranOpen. This is the first time we have reached Quarter Finals of a major tournament in our short history. The competition was held in Tehran on April 03-07, 2012.

Saleha Raza Visiting Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, UK (October 2012)

Ms. Saleha Raza is spending 3 months (Oct 2012 - Jan 2013) as Research Internee at Microsoft Research, Cambridge (MSRC). She is working with Infer.Net team on probabilistic graphical models. Ms. Raza has already been working in the areas of Machine learning and probabilistic reasoning and exposure of MSRC will add immense value to her research profile.

Karachi Koalas Finish in the Top 10 at World RoboCup Soccer (June 2012)

Karachi Koalas, the joint RoboCup Soccer team (3D Simulation League) of Institute of Business Administration and University of Technology, Sydney, participated in World RoboCup 2012 and reached the Top 10 stage of the competition. Up 6 ranks from 2011. The competition was held in Mexico City during June 18-24, 2012. During this exciting journey, Karachi Koalas defeated CIT3D (China, Runner up of 2011) and Socio3D (Japan) and had drawn matches against BoldHearts (UK, Winner of IranOpen 2011, GermanOpen 2010 and GermanOpen 2009), Apollo3D (China, World Champion in 2010), beeStanbul (Turkey), Odens (Japan) and FUT-K (Japan).

Karachi Koalas' peformance was also covered by Samaa TV. The report can be watched at the following link:
Samaa TV Coverage

Karachi Koalas Participated in IranOpen 2012 (April 2012)

Karachi Koalas, the joint RoboCup Soccer team (3D Simulation League) of Institute of Business Administration and University of Technology, Sydney, participated in IranOpen 2012 and reached the 2nd round of the competition. The competition was held in Tehran on April 03-07, 2012. We could have still qualified to the next round had we not faced a technical glitch against Nexus3D where our complete team disappeared from the ground. During this exciting journey, we defeated couple of teams. But the most important highlight of the event was the drawn game against CIT3D (runner-up of 2011 World RoboCup Soccer).

Students of Game Programming & Robotics class participated in Robotics competition (March 2012)

A Lego Robots based Sumo Wrestling and Battle Royale competition was organized among the students of Introduction to Game Programming & Robotics class on March 30, 2012. 4 groups participated in the competition. Sumo competition was won by "Cheetah" designed by Abdun Nafay, Imran Hemani, Mirza Taimoor and Safeer-e-Hussain. Battle Royale was won by "I-Bot" designed by Saba Channa, Sarchina Kumari and Sojhro.

Karachi Koalas Qualifies for World RoboCup 2012 (March 2012)

Karachi Koalas has qualified for the World RoboCup 2012 to be held in Mexico City on June 18 - 24, 2012.

Shaukat Raza won Fellowships to Pursue PhD at UTS (December 2011)

Mr. Shaukat Raza, who has been working as an RA in the AI Lab for the past 15 months, has been awarded UTS Tuition Scholarship and a 3 year Australian Research Council stipend to undertake a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney. This award would further strengthen the ongoing collaboration between the Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab at UTS and the Artificial Intelligence Lab at IBA.

Doctorate Degree Awarded to Quratulain Rajput (December 2011)

Ms. Quratulain Rajput has been awarded doctorate degree by IBA during the 2011 convocation held on December 2, 2011. She, thus becomes the first PhD of not only the AI Lab but the whole IBA. Her work is in the area of Semantic Web.

Research Grant by ICT R&D Fund (November 2011)

AI Lab has won a research grant of Rs. 8.5 Millions from ICT R&D Fund of Pakistan to build an Anti-Money Laundering System. This is a joint project between the AI Lab and Credit-Chex, Inc. The grant would allow the lab to offer RA position to 2 MS Students and 1 PhD student for the duration of the project(18 months).

Saleha Raza Visiting UTS for 5 months (September 2011)

Ms. Saleha Raza is visiting the Center for Quantum Computation & Intelligent Systems (QCIS) at University of Technology Sydney for 5 months (September, 2011 - January, 2012). She is primarily working with the UTS RoboCup Soccer team - winner of 2004 and runner-up of 2008 RoboCup Soccer competitions in the Standard Platform League. The trip is sponsored by the Australian Govt. under Endeavour Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.

Ms. Saleha Raza is working on serveral research problems related to imitation-based learning, path planning optimization and RoboCup strategy modeling using First Order Bayesian Networks.

Fourth " Robo Workshop using Lego" Successfully Organized at IBA (September 2011)

The 4th workshop of the "Robo Workshop using Lego" seried was successfully conducted at IBA on Sep 24-25, 2011. The workshop was attended by 28 A-Level/Intermediate pre-Engineering students of various schools and colleges. The students were taught how to build robots and how to control and program robots movement using the inputs they receive through their sensors. The students participated in "Robot Building", "Maze Solver", "Sumo Wrestling" and "Battle Royal" competitions. The photos and videos of the activities and the competitions are available on the workshop's Facebook page:

Research Grant by HEC (August 2011)

AI Lab has won a research grant of Rs. 2.5 Millions from Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. The grant would allow the lab to offer fully funded RA position to 3 MS Students (each year for the next 3 years). The grant would help in further strengthing the Karachi Koalas team.

AI Lab got a Nao Robot (July 2011)

AI Lab has got a Nao Robot from University of Technology, Sydney. This autonomous robot is worth 7500 Euros and is an invaluable gift from UTS. Nao is a programmable and autonomous humanoid robot. It contains gyro, accelerometer, ultrasonic and sound sensors. In addition, it has two cameras and capability to recognize faces and shapes. The robot would immensely help the AI lab in continuing the collaboration with the Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab at UTS. The following video demonstrates some of the capabilities of the Nao robot:
Youtube Link

Karachi Koalas Among the Top 16 Teams in World RoboCup 2011 (July 2011)

Karachi Koalas World RoboCup journey ended on a very high note. The team was among the top 16 teams of the tournament and impressed everyone with its performance. The event was covered by Geo TV as well. The report can be watched at the following link:
Geo TV Coverage

AI Lab Participated in Transformation Leadership Workshop (July 2011)

AI Lab participated in the Transformation Leadership Workshop that was held at Avari Hotel during 18-21 July, 2011. The workshop was organized by the Center for Executive Education (CEE), IBA and was attended by 28 senior level managers. During one of the sessions, these managers were introduced to Lego Mindstorm robots. The robots were then used during couple of team building and leadership exercises.

Karachi Koalas Qualifies for World RoboCup 2011 (May 2011)

Karachi Koalas has qualified for the World RoboCup 2011 to be held in Istanbul on July 5-11 , 2011. This is a remarkable achievement for a team which is 6-8 months old as the entry to the World RoboCup is very competitive and new teams typically have to wait for 2 years before they can qualify for the competition.

Karachi Koalas Participated in IranOpen (April 2011)

Karachi Koalas, the joint RoboCup Soccer team (3D Simulation League) of Institute of Business Administration and University of Technology, Sydney, participated in IranOpen 2011 and reached the 2nd round of the competition. The competition was held in Tehran on April 05-09, 2011.

Third " Robo Workshop using Lego" Successfully Organized at IBA (February 2011)

The 3rd workshop of the "Robo Workshop using Lego" seried was successfully conducted at IBA on Feb 26-27, 2011. The workshop was attended by 16 A-Level/Intermediate pre-Engineering students of various schools and colleges. The students were taught how to build robots and how to control and program robots movement using the inputs they receive through their sensors. The students participated in "Robot Building", "Maze Solver", "Sumo Wrestling" and "Battle Royal" competitions. The photos and videos of the activities and the competitions are available on the workshop's Facebook page:

RoboCup Soccer Team Established (October 2010)

AI Lab has joined hands with the Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab at University of Technology Sydney to develop a RoboCup Soccer team in 3D Simulation League. The team has been named "Karachi Koalas" and it aims to participate in Regional and World RoboCup Soccer competitions. More details about Karachi Koalas can be read at the team website .

RoboCup Soccer has become one of the most challenging yet exciting global competitions within Computer Science/Engineering with the stated goal that by 2050 a team of robots will defeat the human world champion FIFA team in soccer.

Prototype of BNOSA Made Available Now (June 2010)

The prototype of BNOSA is made available online on June 10, 2010. BNOSA (Bayesian Network and Ontology based Semantic Annotation) is a semantic annotation framework that works on unstructured, ungrammatical and incohorent web data sources. The prototype can be tested on the link below:

Version 1.0 of IBAyes Released (May 2010)

Version 1.0 of IBAyes is released on May 20, 2010. IBAyes is a probabilistic reasoning tool that allows its user to model uncertain situations and to perform inference using Bayesian networks and its variants such as Influence Nets. Version 1.0 removes all the bugs found in the Beta version. The software can be downloaded from the link below:

Students of BS-6 participated in Robotics competition (May 2010)

A Lego Robots based Sumo Wrestling and Battle Royale competition was organized among the students of BS-6 on May 18, 2010. 4 groups participated in the competition. Sumo competition was won by "Chotu" designed by Anoosha Shahid and Sana Zahra. Battle Royale was won by "Robos" designed by Rafay Naseem and M. Zohaib Khan.

Beta Version of IBAyes Released (March 2010)

The beta version of IBAyes is released on March 28, 2010. IBAyes is a probabilistic reasoning tool that allows its user to model uncertain situations and to perform inference using Bayesian networks and its variants such as Influence Nets. The software can be downloaded from the link below:

Second " Robo Workshop using Lego" Successfully Organized at IBA (February 2010)

The 2nd workshop of the "Robo Workshop using Lego" seried was successfully conducted at IBA on Feb 20-21, 2010. The workshop was attended by 18 A-Level/Intermediate pre-Engineering students of 4 schools and colleges. The students were taught how to build robots and how to control and program robots movement using the inputs they receive through their sensors. The students participated in "Robot Building", "Maze Solver", "Sumo Wrestling" and "Battle Royal" competitions. The photos and videos of the activities and the competitions are available on the workshop's Facebook page:

Robotics Workshop for A-Level/Intermediate Students on Feb 20-21, 2010

The Artificial Intelligence Lab @ IBA is pleased to announce a Robotics Workshop for A-Level/Intermediate students on Feb 20-21 (Sat-Sun). The last date of registration is Feb 15, 2010. Seats are limited and will be served on first-come first-serve basis. For details, please visit the workshop website: http://ailab.iba.edu.pk/robotics/

First " Robo Workshop using Lego" Successfully Organized at IBA (January 2010)

The 1st workshop of the "Robo Workshop using Lego" seried was successfully conducted at IBA on Jan 16-17, 2010. The workshop was attended by 24 A-Level/Intermediate pre-Engineering students of 9 schools and colleges. The students were taught how to build robots and how to control and program robots movement using the inputs they receive through their sensors. The students participated in "Robot Building", "Maze Solver", "Sumo Wrestling" and "Battle Royal" competitions. The photos and videos of the activities and the competitions are available on the workshop's Facebook page:

Robotics Workshop for A-Level/Intermediate Students on Jan 16-17, 2010

The Artificial Intelligence Lab @ IBA is pleased to announce a Robotics Workshop for A-Level/Intermediate students on Jan 16-17 (Sat-Sun). The last date of registration is Jan 05, 2010. Seats are limited and will be served on first-come first-serve basis. For details, please visit the workshop website: http://ailab.iba.edu.pk/robotics/

Destructor won Lego Robots Sumo Wrestling and Battle Royal Competition (October 2009)

The Destructor robot designed by Taimoor Zubair won both the Sumo Wrestling and Battle Royal competitions held in IBA on October 6, 2009. Other robot participants included Spidor (designed by Ammar), Undertaker (designed by Taahirah) and Bhola (designed by Sajjad). The photos and videos of the competitions have been posted on the Photos and Videos sections of this website.

Sumo Wrestling and Battle Royal on October 6, 2009

The Sumo and Battle Rolyal competition will be organized on October 6 at 2 PM. The location is room B4, CCS block. For details, visit the competition website: http://cse460robotics.wikispaces.com/sumo

Sumo Wrestling and Battle Royal Coming Soon to IBA (October 2009)

The competition is organized during the first week of October. The details will be posted soon.

Two New PhD Students Joined the AI Lab (August 2009)

The AI Lab welcomes Ms. Asma Larik and Ms. Saleha Raza on joining the AI Lab as PhD students .

"Introduction to Game Programming and Robotics" course to be offered in Fall 2009 (June 2009)

The course introduces the fundamentals of game programming and robotics. This is a programming intensive course and students are required to spend a significant amount of time in developing interactive games and creating virtual simulation environments to be used in conjunction with robots. Students will get hands on experience of XNA Studio Express, Microsoft Robotics Development Studio, and Lego Robots. The main focus of the course is on the processes, algorithms, and mathematics necessary to create 3D computer games and to build autonomous robots for various tasks. The course provides great opportunity to students to expand their programming and engineering skills even if they are not interested in pursuing careers in robots or video games development.

Prerequisites: CSE142 and (CSE307 or MIS302)

Students of "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" class participated in Robotics competition (May 2009)

A Lego Robots based competition was organized among the students of "Introduction to AI" class on May 02, 2009. Groups of students were given the task of taking Lego robots out of a maze. Students were required to program the robot in a way that it can handle/avoid different obstacles using its various sensors (ultrasonic, touch, light, etc.). For photos of the competition, click here.

Osama Khan won the Lego Robot competition held in Saudi Arabia (March 2009)

Osama Khan, a student of IBA BS(CS) program, was part of the team that won the Lego Robots competition held in Al-Jubail, Saudi Arabia. The competition was part of LEC 2009 that was attended by 80 professionals, teachers and students. Among the participants were students from Al-Ahliya school (winner of "First Lego League 2008), King Fahad University of Petroleum and Minearal Sciences, New York Institute of Technology and students from several schools of Middle East region.Mr. Robert Rasmussen, Chairman TUFTS University-Center for Educational Outreach, was a guest speaker during the conference. He also conducted workshops on the use of Lego robots in different areas of study.

Towards the end of the conference, a competition was held in which teams were assigned the task of creating robots that can travel on a Mars-like surface and record data regrading the altitudes, light, sound, limits, etc. Osama Khan was part of the team that won this competition.