Assistant Professor at the Department of Data Science,

University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.

Prior to this, he served as Lecturer and Assistant Professor at the College of Information Technology (PUCIT), University of the Punjab. He has more than eleven (11) years of experience in teaching and research. Ali’s teaching and research interests are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision. In addition to academics, he has been actively engaged in planning and overseeing the implementation of development projects at the university. Ali got his BS in Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, which is one of the top engineering schools in the country. Later, he became interested in the field of Computer Science after doing his undergraduate project, which involved developing software solutions for the design and detailing of two-way edge supported slab systems. Pursuing his newfound interest in the field, Ali got his Master's from PUCIT with distinction. Afterward, he got the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship and proceeded to study Computer Science in the United States at the University of Central Florida (UCF). Ali got his MS and Ph.D. from UCF in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Ali’s current research focus lies mainly on the problem of scene text recognition. Text recognition in natural scene images is an important and challenging problem in the field of Computer Vision. The importance lies in such applications as assisting visually impaired persons, automatic retrieval of information, navigation systems in driverless cars, etc. The challenges of the problem stem from the variability of the typefaces, imaging conditions, noise, and other image distortions. He is currently working on efficient segmentation of textual information from scene images and the problem of photo OCR for the Urdu language.