Junaid Akhtar Email & Phone Number

Can any of what I've managed to do in classrooms be brought to the internet scale?I head the Learn to Code vertical at Educative.

Rethinking Computing Education in Pakistan. Primary Goals are:- Enhance the quality of computing science education in Pakistan, at all levels.- Promote scholarship in the practice of computing science education as a subject in its own right: to discuss, deliberate, investigate, document, disseminate, and practice.- Synthesize international best practices, state-of-art, and both immediate and future-looking considerations into a narrative contextualized specifically for Pakistan.

Mianwali, Pakistan

- Taught: Operating Systems, Artificial Intelligence for Games, Introduction to Computing, Discrete Maths, Social Science, Digital Logic Design, Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems, Philosophy for computer scientists, Quantitative and Computational Reasoning, Analysis of Algorithms.- Research interests aim to solve the critical problems within computational sciences and artificial intelligence using Peirce's semiotics and abductive logic - e.g. the problems of grounding and explainability.--Curated a Deep-AI research group with the aim of designing and developing more reasonable (in human terms) AI systems for the domain of language understanding, medical diagnosis etc.- Besides academic freedom, Namal, at its nascent stage, gave me a wonderful opportunity in terms of institution building:--Headed Academic Integrity Framework committee at Namal.--Headed academic Quality Enhancement Cell for 5 years, that consciously placed quality over quantity.--Headed core curriculum working group that was formed in anticipation of Namal's degree awarding status as an institute - brought HEC's almost sterile curricular template in a fine relationship with humanities and industrial needs.--Mentored and initiated Namal's first official student council with the aim that fits Namal's motto for its students: 'shaping those who shape the future.'--Headed a primary school for Namal College's faculty as well as residents of the valley, that aimed at a holistic approach towards education, inspired by Khoj methodolody (http://khoj.edu.pk/).

Peirce's Semiotics and Pragmatism with application in computational linguistics

During my PhD, I’ve worked on Evolutionary Algorithms and studied the possibility of incorporating Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of evolution into them. Multiple publications at top international conferences and journals.

Founding member of RICE, an AI research group dedicated to Robotics and Intelligent Computing.Worked on Arabic Phonetic Recognition using Neural Networks, and consequently published three international conference papers.Got hands on experience in Fuzzy Systems, Genetic Algorithms and Neural Networks over the years

Taught Artificial Intelligence, Introduction to Algorithms, Introduction to Research in Computer Science and Theory of Computation at BSc. and MPhil. levels.Supervised many interesting final year projects, one of which made it to the regional finals of Imagine Cup 2011, another in 2012. Research findings from two final year projects got accepted in two international conferences - FIT and INMIC 2012; one at AAAI.

I was responsible along with 4 other team members for developing the contents (lecture notes, quizzes, solutions) and assisting recording for television of a nationally aired distance learning course titled Artificial Intelligence for the Virtual University. I was specifically in charge of the lectures on Fuzzy Systems, Learning, Planning and some Advanced Topics.

Designed and developed a web based three-tiered system for automation of internal infrastructure of Softweb using VB, ASP and SQL.

Phd, Evolutionary Computation

Thesis Title: Evolutionary Algorithms based on non-Darwinian Theories of Evolution: The Peircean Perspective

Ms, Computer Sciene - Artificial Intelligence

Bs, Computer Science