Positions
Empathic Computing Lab, University of Auckland
Remote Research Intern · Aug 2025 – Dec 2025 · Supervisor: Dr. Nastaran SaffaryazdiBuilding multimodal distributed LLM-based systems for adaptive conversational agents. Integrating real-time neural and physiological signals to enable emotionally intelligent and context-aware human–AI interaction. Exploring multimodal fusion strategies and distributed deployment frameworks.Lab profile
Empathic Computing Lab, University of South Australia
Remote Researcher · Sep 2024 – Feb 2025 · Supervisor: Dr. Kaining (Kai) ZhangInvestigated EEG, head movement, eye gaze, and physiological signals to model user intent and preference in HCI contexts. Designed data preprocessing and feature extraction pipelines for multimodal biosignal analysis. Developed deep learning models (LSTM, GRU, TCN) for time-series classification from raw EEG, head movement, and eye gaze signals.Lab profile
Habib University, Karachi
Undergraduate Researcher · May 2023 – Aug 2024 · Supervisor: Dr. Muhammad FarhanLed research on camouflaged object detection for military surveillance, wildlife monitoring, and autonomous vision systems. Developed synthetic data generation pipelines using GANs. Designed and trained custom deep learning models achieving improved detection accuracy.Lab Research page
Areas
Multimodal AI and LLMs
Adaptive conversational agents, multimodal fusion, distributed LLM architectures, real-time neural signal integration
Computer vision
Camouflaged object detection, instance segmentation, synthetic data generation, YOLOv8, Mask R-CNN
Cognitive computing
EEG signal analysis, physiological signal processing, user intent modeling, time-series classification
Autonomous robotics
SLAM, ROS 2 navigation, dynamic path planning (DWB, TEB, RRT*), mobile robot systems
Supervisors & collaborators
| Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Dr. Mark Billinghurst | Head of Empathic Computing Lab |
| Dr. Nastaran Saffaryazdi | Empathic Computing Lab, University of Auckland, New Zealand |
| Dr. Kaining (Kai) Zhang | Empathic Computing Lab, University of South Australia, Australia |
| Dr. Muhammad Farhan | Habib University, Pakistan |
| Dr. Qasim Pasta | Habib University, Pakistan |
| Dr. Basit Memon | Habib University, Pakistan |
| Dr. M. Mobeen Movania | Habib University, Pakistan |
| Dr. Muhammad Shahid Shaikh | Habib University, Pakistan |