About Malaya AI Research

Malaya AIR sits within the Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology at Universiti Malaya, and is not a separate institution. Its role is to give the faculty's artificial intelligence research a shared structure: a set of named research areas, a small number of flagship projects that cut across them, and a steering committee that holds responsibility for governance, industry engagement, research assets, visibility and grants.

That structure matters because AI research at the faculty is spread across several groups and departments. Grouping it makes existing collaborations visible, gives external partners a single point of contact, and makes it easier for postgraduate students to find the supervisors whose work matches their interests.

The centre works on both fundamental and applied artificial intelligence, and treats the two as connected rather than sequential. Fundamental work on representation learning, optimisation, interpretability and multimodal models is what makes applied results possible; applied work in clinical imaging, robotics and language technology is where the limits of those methods become visible.

The centre organises its work into 7 research areas. They overlap deliberately: most academic members appear under more than one, and the flagship projects are defined by the places where two or more areas meet.

• Computer Vision & Multimodal AI →
• Medical Imaging & Healthcare AI →
• Natural Language Processing & VLMs →
• Explainable / Trustworthy AI →
• Human-Robot Interaction & Robotics →
• Graph Learning / AIoT / Smart Systems →
• Optimisation & Fuzzy Systems →

Applied work at the centre currently runs along five lines. In healthcare, members publish on medical image segmentation and detection, clinical risk assessment and radiology report generation, and the TrustGuard flagship groups that work with research on federated learning and explainability. In robotics, work covers autonomous and multi-robot systems, swarm methods and real-time sensor analysis.

In language technologies, the Lingua Cognito flagship covers NLP, text processing and inclusive multimodal systems for education and heritage. In intelligent systems, members work on graph learning, AIoT, edge deployment and educational technology. Industry collaboration includes two Universiti Malaya spin-off companies founded by members of the centre, Fylix and UMCH Technology.

Academic members of Malaya AIR supervise postgraduate research students within the Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology. Prospective students who want to work in a particular area are encouraged to read the research area pages and approach the relevant academic member directly, rather than applying to the centre as a whole.

Because the research areas overlap, students frequently work with supervisors from more than one. Several members also work on robotics and STEM education, which brings the centre's systems into teaching settings.

Malaya AIR works with other faculties, with industry and with international collaborators. The forms of collaboration currently open are:

• Joint research, including co-authored work and shared research questions across disciplines.
• Student supervision, including co-supervision with partner institutions.
• Technology transfer, including work routed through Universiti Malaya spin-off companies.
• Translational pilots that test research methods in a clinical, industrial or educational setting.
• Industry engagement on specific technical problems.

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