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Personal:

Brief Bio: I was born in Karachi, Pakistan sometime in 1984. During secondary and high school I won a number of national software competitions (1998, 1999, 2000x2, 2001, 2002; competing with 25-500 other students, coding primarily on C/C++, 8086 Assembler, FoxPro, QBasic), and got on the Pakistan-I team (one of three members) competing in under-18 International Programming Olympiads (SEARCC ISSC) consecutively for 3 years (Singapore 2000, Philippines 2001, New Zealand 2002). I studied for my bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering in Karachi, and then after a short stint as a lecturer at my home university went for the master's degree to Munich, Germany. After finishing my master's, I started a PhD at TU Darmstadt in Germany where I worked for one-year, eventually moving to ETH-Zurich in Switzerland with my supervisor who became Professor there. I moved to London in January 2014, doing a postdoc stint at Imperial College London. In the fall of 2015, I moved to Silicon Valley to work as a researcher at NEC Laboratories America.

At the end of my postdoc, I got accepted for a tenure-track position to lead a new Robot Vision group at the leading engineering university NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. Unfortunately, I ended up declining that offer due to personal reasons as I moved to Silicon Valley. In a parallel universe, perhaps I work on even more exciting problems that I had envisioned doing there!

Over the past one year or so, I have become quite active on Quora - and am a "Top Writer 2016" there! I mostly try to answer technical questions or express my opinions about matters related to AI, computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. I like to read books on pretty much everything in my spare time, and the "Books" link above points out some of my favorite titles.

Over the last 9 years, I have had the good fortune of working with and learning from some of the most renowned scientists in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Robotics at ETH-Zurich, Imperial College London, Stanford University, Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics, TU-Munich, and Qualcomm Research.