Wfar-21

Dear WFAR-21 Participants, Due to the unsettling political situation of the country, the tutorials scheduled on 29-Oct-2022 have been postponed. We appreciate you cooperation and apologize for the inconveniences caused.

For more information, kindly visit the site of the workshop

WFAR Register Here for the Workshop Register Here for the Competitions

Respected Participants of WFAR-21,
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the tutorials scheduled on 22-Oct-2022 have been postponed.
Now the tutorials are rescheduled on 29-Oct-2022 (Saturday).

Wfar-21 Registration Desk

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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Prof. Dr. Yasar Ayaz
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.

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.

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.

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.