Arslan Munir
Associate Professor
Daniel and Judi Burk — Carl and Mary Ice Keystone Research Scholar
Department of Computer Science
Kansas State Unversity
Department of Computer Science
Kansas State Unversity
Arslan Munir is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science (CS) at Kansas State University (K-State). He is also an affiliated (ancillary) faculty in the K-State Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He joined K-State as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in June 2017. Before joining K-State, he was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) from July 2014 to June 2017. He was a postdoctoral research associate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA from May 2012 to June 2014. He received his M.A.Sc. in ECE from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada, in 2007 and his Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Florida (UF), Gainesville, Florida, USA, in 2012. He also worked as a visiting graduate research student at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada for one semester during his Ph.D. From 2007 to 2008, he worked as a software development engineer at Mentor Graphics in the Embedded Systems Division. He also worked as a software engineer at Techlogix Limited in 2007.
Dr. Munir's current research interests include embedded and cyber-physical systems, secure and trustworthy systems, computer architecture, artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, parallel computing, edge computing, quantum computing, quantum machine learning, and fault tolerance. He is a founding director of the Intelligent Systems, Computer Architecture, Analytics, and Security (ISCAAS) laboratory at K-State. His current research projects include designing a fog-assisted smart agriculture framework for multi-layer sensing and real-time analytics of water-nitrogen colimitations in field crops, design of secure and dependable autonomous vehicles and intelligent transportation systems, AI-assisted spacecraft trajectory optimization and planning, AI-enable situational awareness, and deep learing-based activity recognition. His research accomplishments have been covered by various news and media outlets.
Dr. Munir was the recipient of many academic awards including the doctoral fellowship from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. He earned gold medals for the best performance in electrical engineering, gold medals and academic roll of honor for securing rank one in pre-engineering provincial examinations (out of approximately 300,000 candidates).
He has published more than 100 scholarly peer-reviewed articles related to his research interests in prestigious journal and conferences, with three of his research papers receiving Best Paper Awards and two more being selected as Best Paper Finalists. One of his papers also received an Outstanding Paper High Commendation Award from IEEE. He has authored a book on Modeling and Optimization of Parallel and Distributed Embedded Systems, which is published by Wiley-IEEE Press, and another of his book on Accelerators for Convolutional Neural Networks has been recently released in October 2023 by Wiley-IEEE Press. He also holds three U.S. patents. His name is included in the list of World's Top 2% Scientists compiled by experts at Stanford University based on the data from Elsevier's Scopus.
He has served as a program committee member and a reviewer for various IEEE and ACM conferences, a reviewer for various IEEE, ACM, and Elsevier journals, and a reviewer for National Science Foundation panels. He has served on the technical program committee of several conferences including ACM GLSVLSI, IEEE ICCD, IEEE iNIS, IARIA ICNS, IEEE CloudNet, IEEE MCSoC, and IEEE/IFIP EUC. He served as a Session Chair in IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), 2020, a Special Sessions Chair in IEEE International Symposium on Smart Electronic Systems in 2021, and a Special Sessions Chair in IFIP International Internet of Things Conference (IFIP-IoT) in 2023. He served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine from 2017 to 2022. He currently serves as an editor for the Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy, and AI journal. He also serves as a guest editor for Journal of Imaging, Entropy journal, and Algorithms journal. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
His research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)/National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). He has been awarded the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative award. He has also been awarded Summer Faculty Fellowships at AFRL, Information Directorate (RI) in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023.
Prospective Ph.D. students: The ISCAAS lab has one Ph.D. research position opening for Fall 2024 in the area of quantum machine learning. Candidates who have done their Masters in Computer Science/Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering (or are about to complete) with a thesis in relevant areas are especially encouraged to apply. Prospective students should have taken courses and/or should have done some projects related to quantum computing and/or quantum machine learning. Basic understanding of quantum computing, machine learning, and Qiskit programming is a must for this position. Candidates with prior research publications in the respective areas are highly encouraged to apply. Prospective candidates should send their CV and any other information such as published papers or completed projects that will strengthen their application to Dr. Arslan Munir (amunir@ksu.edu). Please only send the email if you have given TOEFL (and obtained a score of 22 or above in each section) or IELTs (and obtained a score of 7.0 or above in speaking section, and 6.5 or above in other sections) and have already given GRE or are planning to give GRE. Due to the enormous number of applications I receive, I may not be able to respond to all the applicants and only the applicants who are selected for interview may receive a response.