Twenty-five years at UTM, seen from the classroom and the server room.
I’ve spent most of my working life at the Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia — lecturer from 2006, Associate Professor since 2019, with a spell running the university’s IT services in between.
An academic life,
connected over time.
Scroll through the milestones that connect research, university service and postgraduate leadership.
The beginning of a long academic chapter at the Faculty of Computing.
PhD at Heriot-Watt University, connecting bio-inspired search with articulated robot motion planning.
A research chapter at Eindhoven University of Technology through Erasmus Mundus IDEAS.
Research, supervision and academic leadership converge at the Faculty of Computing.
I started as a lecturer at the Faculty of Computing in 2006 and moved into the Associate Professor role in 2019. In between, I managed IT services for the university for a few years, then became Deputy Director of UTMDigital. So I’ve seen this place from the classroom side and the server room side, which is a strange combination but a useful one.
My current academic responsibility is coordinating the PhD in Computer Science programme at the Faculty of Computing. I previously served as Head of the Pervasive Computing Research Group (PCRG) and as the Faculty of Computing Research Manager (November 2022 – October 2025).
Foraging Ant Motion Planning for Articulated Robots
My PhD looked at how the search behaviour of foraging ants can be turned into a motion-planning strategy for articulated robots. In 2012 I spent a few months at Eindhoven University of Technology as a visiting researcher, on an Erasmus Mundus IDEAS scholarship.
My research sits across pervasive computing, motion planning, and underwater wireless sensor networks, with an emphasis on work that has direct human use.
Computing in physical places
I’m also attached to KALAM, UTM’s centre for the study of the built environment in the Malay world, which has nothing to do with computing on paper and everything to do with it in practice. Positioning research needs a real, awkward, physical space to fail in before it works anywhere.