MUET Jamshoro
🎓 Undergraduate
Curriculum Timetable Forms Final Year Projects📚 Postgraduate
Curriculum Timetable Forms Research Areas
Professor
Department of Telecommunication Engineering
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
B.E (MUET), MSc (Strathclyde), PhD (Cardiff)Professor working on machine learning for speech, language and behaviour analysis, with applications in mental health screening, neurodegenerative disease detection and network intrusion detection. Multiple podium finishes at international AI challenges.
📅
18+
Years Teaching (since 2008)
📚
44
Book Chapters, Journal & Conference Papers
🧑🏫
30
Theses Supervised (3 PhD, 27 Master's)
🏆
8
International AI Challenges Entered
Dr. Zafi Sherhan Syed is a Professor in the Department of Telecommunication Engineering at Mehran University of Engineering & Technology (MUET), Jamshoro. He joined the department in 2008 as a Laboratory Lecturer and progressed through Lecturer (2009), Assistant Professor (2013) and Associate Professor (2022) to Professor in December 2024.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science and Informatics from Cardiff University, UK, funded by a full international scholarship, where his research focused on automated screening methods for mental and neurodevelopmental disorders. He also holds an MSc in Communications, Control and Digital Signal Processing from the University of Strathclyde as a Commonwealth Scholar, and a B.E. in Telecommunication from MUET.
His research applies machine learning to speech, text and sensor data: recognising Alzheimer's dementia and Parkinsonian speech, screening for depression and bipolar disorder, speech emotion recognition for Urdu and Sindhi, and explainable intrusion detection for vehicular and IoT networks. His teams have placed first, second and third in tasks at Interspeech, ACM Multimedia and IEEE ACII challenges.
He serves as Academic Editor for PLOS ONE (since 2024), Focal Person of the Record Access and Data Retrieval (RADAR) Center at MUET, and has contributed as a Course Development Expert (Telecommunication) for the National Curriculum Council, Government of Pakistan.
PhD in Computer Science and Informatics
Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom (fully funded)
Thesis: Automated Screening Methods for Mental and Neurodevelopment Disorders
MSc in Communications, Control, and Digital Signal Processing
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom (Commonwealth Scholarship, DFID)
B.E. in Telecommunication
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro, Pakistan (Merit Scholarship)
Dec 2024 – Present
Professor, Department of Telecommunication Engineering
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
Aug 2023 – Present
Focal Person, Record Access and Data Retrieval (RADAR) Center
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
Nov 2023 – Feb 2024
Instructor, Artificial Intelligence course (NAVTTC–Telecom Department partnership)
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
May 2023 – May 2024
Data Scientist
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
Jan 2022 – Dec 2024
Associate Professor, Department of Telecommunication Engineering
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
Apr 2013 – Jan 2022
Assistant Professor, Department of Telecommunication Engineering
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
Aug 2009 – Apr 2013
Lecturer, Department of Telecommunication Engineering
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
Jul 2008 – Aug 2009
Laboratory Lecturer, Department of Telecommunication Engineering
Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Jamshoro
Course Development Expert (Telecommunication)
National Curriculum Council, Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, Government of Pakistan
2013–2014, 2019–2020
Secretary, IEEE Communications Society Karachi Chapter
IEEE, USA
Staircase Classification with Acoustic Representations for ALS Severity Recognition
Syed, Z.S., Perry, R., Conway, F., Lowit, A., Cohen, W., Di Caterina, G. — 31st IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC 2026)
A Hybrid Approach for Intrusion Detection in Vehicular Networks using Feature Selection and Dimensionality Reduction with Optimized Deep Learning
Hassan, F., Syed, Z.S., Memon, A.A., et al. — PLOS ONE 20(2), e0312752
An Explainable AI Approach to Speech-Based Alzheimer's Dementia Screening
Iqbal, F., Syed, Z.S., Syed, M.S.S., Syed, A.S. — Interspeech 2024 Satellite Workshop "Speech, Music, and Mind"
Achieving Model Explainability for Intrusion Detection in VANETs with LIME
Hassan, F., Yu, J., Syed, Z.S., Ahmed, N., Al Reshan, M.S., Shaikh, A. — PeerJ Computer Science, 9:e1440
A Machine-Learning-Based Intrusion Detection for IIoT Infrastructure
Aftab, S., Shah, Z.S., Memon, S.A., Shaikh, Q. — International Multitopic Conference (IMTIC), IEEE
Praise or Insult? Identifying Cyberbullying Using Natural Language Processing
Tariq, N., Syed, Z.S., Saba, E. — International Multitopic Conference (IMTIC), IEEE
Tackling the ADReSSo Challenge 2021: The MUET-RMIT System for Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition from Spontaneous Speech
Syed, Z.S., Syed, M.S.S., Lech, M., Pirogova, E. — Interspeech 2021, pp. 3815–3819
Automated Recognition of Alzheimer's Dementia Using Bag-of-Deep-Features and Model Ensembling
Syed, Z.S., Syed, M.S.S., Lech, M., Pirogova, E. — IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 88377–88390
Deep Acoustic Embeddings for Identifying Parkinsonian Speech
Syed, Z.S., Memon, S.A., Memon, A.L. — International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 11(10)
Introducing the Urdu-Sindhi Speech Emotion Corpus
Syed, Z.S., Memon, S.A., Shah, M.S., Syed, A.S. — International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 11(4)
Computational Paralinguistics: Automatic Assessment of Emotions, Mood and Behavioural State from Acoustics of Speech
Syed, Z.S., Schroeter, J., Sidorov, K.A., Marshall, A.D. — Interspeech 2018, pp. 511–515
Automated Screening for Bipolar Disorder from Audio/Visual Modalities
Syed, Z.S., Sidorov, K., Marshall, D. — ACM Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop, pp. 39–45
Depression Severity Prediction Based on Biomarkers of Psychomotor Retardation
Syed, Z.S., Sidorov, K., Marshall, D. — ACM 7th Annual Workshop on Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge, pp. 37–43
Visual Analytics for Automated Human Behaviour in Learning Environments (book chapter)
Syed, Z.S., Shaikh, F.K., Syed, M.S.S., Syed, A. — Intelligent Video Analytics: Clustering and Classification Applications, CRC Press, pp. 221–250
Legal Issue Recommendation System using LLM and Generative AI (Aasia Memon)
PhD, in progress · Ongoing
Debate Intelligence: A Computational Framework for Communication Proficiency Recognition (Shakeel Laghari)
PhD, in progress · Ongoing
Multimodal Deep-Learning based Deception Detection Framework (Junaid Baloch)
PhD, in progress · Ongoing
Meme Minds: Depression Symptom Detection Using LLMs and Multimodal Analysis (Kainat Memon)
Master's, in progress · Ongoing
NLP for Intent Detection in Autism Parenting Discussions on Reddit (Mahanuma Aamir)
Master's, in progress · Ongoing
Unveiling the Overlap: XAI for Distinguishing Depression and Bipolar Disorder (Aniqa Khan)
Master's · Graduated
Multi-corpus Speech Emotion Recognition for Urdu (Unzela Talpur)
Master's · Graduated
XAI for Alzheimer's Disease Screening based on Speech (Faiza Iqbal)
Master's · Graduated
Detection of Wearing-off Phenomenon in Parkinson's Disease Patients (Syed Ali Abbas Shah)
Master's · Graduated
Machine Learning based Intrusion Detection for IoT Infrastructure (Sameer Aftab)
Master's · Graduated
Towards Automated Recognition of Schizophrenia from EEG Signals (Saqib Hussain)
Master's · Graduated
COVID Detection from X-Ray Images through Ensemble of Machine Learning Models (Shahzaib Khalid)
Master's · Graduated
Emotion Recognition for Sindhi Language using Machine Learning (Tanveer Ahmed)
Master's · Graduated