Our Team

People of Malaya AIR

Meet the academic members driving Malaya AI Research — a multidisciplinary team spanning computer vision, NLP, robotics, medical AI, and trustworthy systems.

Assoc. Prof. Ts. Dr. Aznul Qalid Md Sabri
Head of Malaya AIR

Assoc. Prof. Ts. Dr. Aznul Qalid Md Sabri

Head of Malaya AIR · Associate Professor, Department of AI

Research Areas: Computer Vision; Machine Learning; AI for Healthcare; NLP
Signature Work: Deep reinforcement and transfer learning for abstractive text summarisation (Computer Speech & Language, 2022).
Impact: Co-founder of UM spin-off Fylix Sdn Bhd (intelligent chatbots); industry–academia grants & commercialisation.

Professors

Prof. Ir. Dr. Chan Chee Seng

Prof. Ir. Dr. Chan Chee Seng

Professor

Research Areas: Computer Vision; Machine Learning; Multimodal AI

Signature Work: CVPR 2024 (InteractDiffusion); NeurIPS 2021 (Deep Hashing); PRL 2024 (Text-VQA).

Impact: Publications in top-tier venues; public service at MOSTI (2020–22) & lead of PICC Unit, CITF.

Prof. Dr. Loo Chu Kiong

Prof. Dr. Loo Chu Kiong

Professor

Research Areas: Lifelong/Continual ML; Explainable Robotics/AI; Trustworthy & Sustainable AI; Medical AI

Signature Work: ACM CSUR 2023 (XAI for agents); IEEE TFUZZ 2024/25 (gastric cancer segmentation).

Impact: High-impact publications; robotics education initiatives; Co-founder of UMCH Technology (WeHealth).

Prof. Dr. Nor Liyana Bt Mohd Shuib

Prof. Dr. Nor Liyana Bt Mohd Shuib

Professor

Research Areas: Expert Systems and Machine Learning; Data Analytics; Data Science Programming and Computing

Signature Work: Research in personalization, e-learning, recommender systems, data analytics, data science, AI applications, and educational technology.

Impact: Ranked among Stanford University top 2% scientists globally in 2023-2024; recipient of more than 30 awards and active in higher education consultancy.

Prof. Ts. Dr. Sri Devi A/P Ravana

Prof. Ts. Dr. Sri Devi A/P Ravana

Professor

Research Areas: Information Retrieval Evaluation; Text Retrieval and Heuristics; Data Science; Data Mining; Machine Learning

Signature Work: PhD in Computer Science and Software Engineering from The University of Melbourne, with research in retrieval evaluation and machine learning.

Impact: International research collaborations, conference leadership, and service through information retrieval and knowledge management communities.

Admins (Dean, HoD)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Norisma Idris

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Norisma Idris

Dean of FCSIT, UM

Research Areas: NLP; Educational/Healthcare AI; Multimodal report generation

Signature Work: Radiology report generation & LLM alignment (2025); AI in education.

Impact: Applying advanced NLP and AI models to critical sectors like healthcare and education.

Dr. Muhammad Shahreeza Safiruz Kassim

Dr. Muhammad Shahreeza Safiruz Kassim

Head of Department (AI)

Research Areas: Statistical Machine Learning; Healthcare AI

Signature Work: Deep ensembles & risk stratification in clinical cohorts (2021–2022).

Impact: Statistical ML models for clinical risk assessment and healthcare AI.

Associate Professors

Associate Prof. Dr. Kasturi Dewi A/P Varathan

Associate Prof. Dr. Kasturi Dewi A/P Varathan

Associate Professor

Research Areas: Data Analytics; Text Mining; Information Retrieval

Signature Work: Published in high-ranked journals and conferences, with award-winning research in data analytics.

Impact: Visiting scientist and research fellow appointments in Switzerland and Malaysia; recipient of national and international research grants.

All Members

Dr. Erma Rahayu Mohd Faizal Abdullah

Dr. Erma Rahayu Mohd Faizal Abdullah

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Computer Vision; Medical Imaging; Ethical/Explainable AI

Signature Work: BMC Oral Health 2024 (CBCT); UMFit cardiac monitoring app.

Impact: Real-world applications in medical imaging, mobile health (UMFit) and industry automation.

Dr. Liew Wei Shiung

Dr. Liew Wei Shiung

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Human–Robot Interaction; Continual Learning; Biomedical Signal Analysis

Signature Work: Co-author, ACM CSUR 2023 (XAI for agents/robots); RNNs for transcranial Doppler classification.

Impact: Key contributions to explainable AI for robotics and biomedical signal analysis.

Dr. Lim Chee Kau

Dr. Lim Chee Kau

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Fuzzy Systems; Machine Learning; Early Action Recognition

Signature Work: PRL 2024 (Text-VQA pruning with Chan); ESWA 2022 (risky gait ranking).

Impact: Collaborative research in vision-language models and ML for healthcare diagnostics.

Dr. Mohamed N. M. Lubani

Dr. Mohamed N. M. Lubani

Lecturer

Research Areas: Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models, Financial AI, Knowledge Representation

Signature Work: Designing and developing production-ready AI solutions that bridge academic research and real-world industry applications

Impact: Applied NLP and AI systems through research and industry-focused innovation

Dr. Narsimlu Kemsaram

Dr. Narsimlu Kemsaram

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: AI-enabled Autonomy; Multi-robot Systems; Swarm Robotics; Aerial Robotics (UAVs)

Signature Work: Learning- and perception-driven methods for collaborative robotic systems in complex real-world environments.

Impact: Research experience across Julius-Maximilians-Universitat Wurzburg, Eindhoven University of Technology, and the University of Luxembourg.

Dr. Nurul Japar

Dr. Nurul Japar

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Computer Vision; Vision–Language Models; Object Detection

Signature Work: Cognitive Computation 2025 (radiology report generation); ICIP 2024 (text detection).

Impact: Advancing vision-language models for healthcare and industrial computer vision.

Dr. Saw Shier Nee

Dr. Saw Shier Nee

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Healthcare AI; Bioinformatics; Medical Image/Signal Analysis

Signature Work: IEEE TFUZZ 2024/25 (gastric cancer segmentation); wearable/biomechanics studies & patents.

Impact: Patented research in healthcare AI, focusing on medical imaging and wearable technologies.

Dr. Unaizah Hanum Obaidellah

Dr. Unaizah Hanum Obaidellah

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: XAI; Educational Technologies; Medical Image Analysis

Signature Work: Dermoscopic pigment network detection & classification using CNNs/XAI (2025).

Impact: Applying explainable AI techniques to medical imaging for improved diagnostics in dermatology.

Dr. Uzair Iqbal

Dr. Uzair Iqbal

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Neural Networks for Machine Learning; Health Systems; Non-communicable Disease Nursing

Signature Work: Cross-disciplinary work connecting machine learning, software engineering, and healthcare systems.

Impact: Applies AI methods to accessible health systems, medical and health sciences, and human societal resilience.

Dr. Uzair Ishtiaq

Dr. Uzair Ishtiaq

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Medical Imaging; Computer Vision; Speech/Audio ML

Signature Work: A Hybrid CNN Model for Dental Age Estimation (BMC Oral Health, 2025); DR Detection (Diagnostics, 2023).

Impact: Developing hybrid AI models for diverse applications in medical imaging and audio processing.

Dr. Woo Chaw Seng

Dr. Woo Chaw Seng

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Image Processing; Digital Watermarking; Medical Imaging; Mobile Computing

Signature Work: Pattern Recognition (biometrics survey); IET works on medical X-rays.

Impact: Contributions to biometrics, digital security (watermarking) and medical X-ray analysis.

Dr. Zainab Malik

Dr. Zainab Malik

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Computer Vision; Video Understanding; Scene Text Recognition

Signature Work: A Novel Key Flow Frame Selection Method for Video Classification (AJSE, 2024).

Impact: Expertise in video understanding, human action recognition and Arabic scene text analysis.

Dr. Zati Hakim Azizul Hasan

Dr. Zati Hakim Azizul Hasan

Senior Lecturer

Research Areas: Computational Intelligence; Robotics & STEM Ed; Optimisation; Edge AI

Signature Work: Particle swarm optimisation variants (2025); neonatal HR estimation via transfer learning (2025).

Impact: Research in optimisation algorithms and healthcare applications; robotics/STEM education.

Roles & interests are summarised; full, up-to-date profiles are on UMExpert.

Leadership

Steering Committee

Governance, port leadership and flagship project leads guiding Malaya AI Research.

Deputy Dean of Research & Innovation

AP Dr. Saaidal Razalli Azzuhri

Head of Malaya AIR

AP Dr. Aznul Qalid Md. Sabri

Committee Track

Port Leaders

Port

Governance

Port

Industry

  1. 1 Dr. Nurul Japar
Port

Research Asset

  1. 1 Dr. Mohamed N. M. Lubani
Port

Visibility

  1. 1 Dr. Unaizah Hanum Obaidellah
Port

Grants

  1. 1 AP Dr. Kasturi Dewi Varathan
Committee Track

Flagship Project Leaders

Focus Area

Research Alignment

Focus Area

TrustGuard AI in Healthcare

  1. 1 Dr. Saw Shier Nee
  2. 2 Dr. Erma Rahayu Mohd Faizal Abdullah
Focus Area

Robotics & Real-Time Analysis

  1. 1 Dr. Narsimlu Kemsaram
  2. 2 Dr. Zati Hakim Azizul Hasan
Focus Area

Lingua Cognito (NLP/Text Processing)

  1. 1 Assoc. Prof. Dr. Norisma Binti Idris
  2. 2 Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aznul Qalid Md. Sabri