Abdul Rehman Abbasi

After completing my B.E. in Electrical Engineering from NED University of Engineering & Technology, Karachi, Pakistan, I received MS Fellowship in Power Plant Engineering in 1997, and completed my Masters in Power Plant Engineering from NED University of Engineering & Technology, Karachi, Pakistan, in 1999. I joined Karachi Nuclear Power Plant as Assistant Engineer (Junior Engineer). From November 1999 to the end of 2001, I worked as Shift Engineer at 100,000 m3/day Reverse Osmosis (RO) desalination water plant. I was then promoted to Senior Engineer and worked as Assistant Operation Engineer at 137 MW power plant until 2005. In the meantime, I also completed my Masters in Computer Science from NED University of Engineering & Technology, Karachi, Pakistan in 2003.

In 2005, I received overseas scholarship by Higher Education Commission, Pakistan for PhD in Mechatronics Engineering. I joined Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok, Thailand in August, 2005.

The field diversity in Mechatronics Engineering was one of the key factors that attracted me. During my PhD research, I explored an exciting and emerging area in machine computations, i.e. affective computing. Affective computing is next-generation computing, based on human emotional responses or clues. This includes using machine vision techniques along with image processing and artificial intelligence methods. The title of my thesis is “A Probabilistic Framework Modeling Relationships between Student Mental States and Body Gestures.”

I proposed and proved dynamic Bayesian-based classification as best suited compared to contemporary methods and substantiated the thesis using data collected by me. The details of my published work follow later in my resume.

During my research, I had the opportunity to meet top researchers and experts of my area of research in international conferences and workshops held in Thailand, Japan, Portugal, Sweden, and USA. I was also invited to work as visiting researcher at the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan by Prof. Dr. Takeaki Uno from Jan-April, 2007 and in June, 2008.

On completion of my PhD in Mechatronics Engineering in July, 2009, I returned to Pakistan and j