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I am an Assistant Professor in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the ¹û¶³Ó°ÔºÌýDepartment of Computer ScienceÌýand also part of the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Science (WEISS), Centre for Artificial Intelligence and ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº Robotics Institute at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº (¹û¶³Ó°Ôº).

My research interests developing computer vision and AI techniques for context awareness, machine consciousness and navigation in minimally invasive and robot-assisted surgery. Particularly, I am interested in context understanding in endoscopic procedures, surgical workflow analysis, field-of-view expansion, 3D reconstruction, perception and navigation for surgical robotics.

I am the Principal Investigator on the Artificial intelligence innovation to accelerate health research grant titled ‘AI-enabled Decision support in Pituitary Surgery (2023-2025)’. During my previous roles at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº, I was one of the leading researchers on the ‘Wellcome/EPSRC Guided Instrumentation for Fetal Therapy and Surgery ()’ project (2014 - 2022) and named researcher on the ‘EPSRC Context-Aware Augmented Reality for Endonasal Surgery project (2022 - 2025)’.

Before joining ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº in 2018, I worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at University of Dundee where I contributed to the ‘EPSRC Augmenting Communication using Environmental data to drive Language Prediction ()’ project. I obtained my PhD in Interactive and Cognitive Environments in 2016, under the Erasmus Mundus Fellowship (), jointly from Queen Mary University of London (UK) and Technical University of Catalonia (Spain). I completed the MSc in Computer Vision and Robotics () in 2011, under the highly competitive Erasmus Mundus Scholarship programme, jointly from Heriot-Watt University (UK), University of Girona (Spain), and University of Burgundy (France). As part of my MSc project, I contributed to the ‘ERC Soft Tissue Intervention Neurosurgical Guide () at Imperial College London (UK)’. Additionally, I hold a Master’s in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor’s in Mechatronics Engineering degrees from National University of Sciences and Technology (Pakistan).

I have authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications and received several awards, including MICCAI-IJCARS best paper award, IPCAI Audience Choice award and awards from several biomedical imaging challenges. Additionally, I am an active member of the MICCAI society and co-organiser of the Endoscopic Vision Challenges at MICCAI since 2020.