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Professor Khurshid Ahmad

Chair of Computer Science (1973) (Computer Science)
Chair of Computer Science (1973) (Trinity Inst. of Neurosciences (TCIN))
LLOYD INSTITUTE
      
Profile Photo

Professor Khurshid Ahmad

Chair of Computer Science (1973) (Computer Science)
LLOYD INSTITUTE

 KHURSHID.AHMAD@tcd.ie

 3531896 8429

Chair of Computer Science (1973) (Trinity Inst. of Neurosciences (TCIN))


I am the Professor of Computer Science in the School of Statistics and Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, Ireland since 2005. He was Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Surrey, UK (1999-2005). I was the founding Head and Professor of Artificial Intelligence of the Department of Computing, University of Surrey, UK (1999-2005); Visiting Professor at the Copenhagen Business School (1998, 2013) and University of Surrey (2005-2008). I grew up in Pakistan where I obtained a first class honours degree in Physics and a Masters in Nuclear Physics with distinction from the University of Karachi: I obtained my PhD degree in Nuclear Structure Physics from the University of Surrey in 1975. My current work seeks to emulate a key human trait of being able to use signals from different modalities (images, speech, texts) with other symbolic and numerical information where available, to learn, to make decisions, to plan, and to control complex systems. My research areas include artificial intelligence, neural networks, fuzzy logic, social media analytics and behavioural finance. Currently I am working on the automatic recognition of facial and voice emotion expression and we are (a) looking at the performance of well known emotion recognition systems; (b) developing a method for synthesising facial expressions with and vocal signals of emotions; and (c) to estimate the impact of these non-verbal emotions on the society at large. I have shown how to estimate the impact of sentiment expressed in texts, across a range of languages, on market movement and election outcomes. The human trait of using multi-modal systems was used by us in building systems that could be used to search for images given verbal cues and to find keywords for describing images. We have shown how such systems can be used in forensic science and diagnostic medicine. My other major projects include building a large-language models to investigate politico-historical questions like the emergence of states; cyber security of critical infrastructure; and, the impact of low-level wind shear at airports. I was trained as a nuclear physicist; in computing I have worked in areas such as forecasting, computer-assisted learning (Russian and German), engineering design, and information extraction from continuous information streams comprising texts, images and numbers. I have designed and implemented systems that learn to deal with the different modalities of communications and systems that learn language like children do. My collaborators have been diverse ranging from major EU and US universities, international banks and financial enterprises, National Gallery of Ireland, law enforcement and emergency management agencies, IT companies like Siemens AG, Cap Gemini, ATOS and others. I have published over 250 papers including 6 books; my most recent book is on the topic of Social Computing and the Law (Cambridge) and a five years before I have published Affective Computing and Sentiment Analysis: Metaphor, Ontology and Terminology (Springer). I have supervised 45 PhD, 1 MPhil, and 21 MSc students successfully, and is currently supervising 2 PhD students and 6 MSc students. I am an elected Fellow of the British Computer Society and of Trinity College Dublin, and a Chartered Engineer of the UK Engineering Council.
  Artificial Intelligence/Cybernetics   Bayesian Inference   Behavioural Economics   behavioural Finance   Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Techniques   Business Cycles/Crises   Cognitive Development/Processes   cognitive linguistics   Computational and theoretical models of cognitive processes   Computer Vision and Image Processing   Content Based Video Analysis   Criminal Information Systems   Decision support tools   Econometric and statistical analysis   Econometrics/Forecasting   Expert Systems   Imaging and Computer Vision   Infant Psychology   Innovation and growth   Internet technologies   Knowledge Acquisition   Knowledge and data engineering   KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEMS   KNOWLEDGE BASES   KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING   Knowledge Management   Knowledge Representation   LANGUAGE ACQUISITION   Language Acquisition and Development   LANGUAGE DISORDER   Multimedia   Natural Language Programming   NEURAL COMPUTING   NEURAL DEVELOPMENT   NEURAL NETWORKS   Neurodegeneration   Neuroinformatics   Nuclear Physics   Pattern Recognition   Relativity   Statistical and simulation methodologies   Systems control, Modelling, Neural networks   Theoretical Physics
Project Title
 Slándáil: Security System for language and image analysis
From
1 April 2014
To
31 March 2017
Summary
Project Slándáil will demonstrate a cost-effective and ethically-correct way in which social media information can be used by an emergency management system. The social media landscape consists of a range of digitized documents in a variety of formats, updated by a diverse and geographically distributed people and organisations. During an emergency, authorities use websites and the population, empowered by social media systems, can broadcast for help or to inform others of their well-being. The burden of search and interpretation in the social media space, however, is largely on the end-users that is the authorities and the citizens. Information obtained during emergencies may contain personal details and the details may or not be correct - there are no protocols for dealing with the ethical and factual provenance of such data. Social media users deploy different modalities of communications, including language, visual icons, and associated meta data. Human beings integrate the information in different modality seamlessly to infer meaning and to make decisions. There are no systems that (a) could aggregate the information in different modalities, and (b) deal with multi-lingual communications during an emergency. Project Slándáil is collaboration of emergency operatives, academics, ethics- and security-oriented NGO and four SMEs. Their common purpose is to make maximum ethical use of the information available in the social media to enhance the performance of emergency management systems. The Project will undertake research in text and image analysis, in ethical and factual provenance of data, together with SMe's specialising in selling systems for social media monitoring and for emergency monitoring. There are experts in human multi-lingual human communication working in the team. This is an Irish-led, Italian, German and British collaboration which will deliver next generation of emergency management systems. TCD is the co-ordinator of the Project
Funding Agency
EU FP7 Programme
Programme
FP7 Security Research
Project Type
Research and Development
Person Months
156
Project Title
 Governance, Risk and Compliance Competence Centre - GRC3 (2012-2013)
From
6 Feb 2012
To
December 2015
Summary
While regulators continue to drive the deployment of new regulations and standards in Governance, Risk and Compliance, industry spending on GRC continues to climb as the constant game of catch up drives complex and costly projects. The approach to regulations and their deployment timing varies greatly across different geographies/jurisdictions which further complicates life for financial services companies, software development organisations and Outsouring companies. GRC3 understands the dynamic nature of the forces influencing industry actions and will be flexible in all respects in order to ensure complete alignment with changes to the research agenda. In order to systematically and profitably conduct business within and across organisations, it is important that agents (people, machines, algorithms) are able to exchange data and that the data has meaning for all the agents involved in the exchange. There are sophisticated technological solutions for such a meaningful exchange for everyone involved. There are a number of systems that can help with the integration of business processes, and some are appearing in the financial industry. However, the standards are designed for different purposes and support different processes. Generation of a high-level ontology would provide means to enhance the interoperability between standards and support streamlined processes across the financial services sector.
Funding Agency
Enterprise Ireland
Programme
Financial Services - Competence Centre Research Programme
Project Type
Research
Person Months
72
Project Title
 Reasoning in Risky Environments: Fuzzy Logic and Multi-criteria decision making
From
Sept 2010
To
August 2012
Summary
The treatment of risk generically is a complex and difficult issue. The aims of our project are (a) the identification of risk from numerical and textual evidence; and (b) the computation of the likelihood of a given risk event using aggregation operators, including Choquet Integrals. The project funding has been made available for Dr Andrea Zemankova to work under the supervision of Prof Khurshid Ahmad
Funding Agency
AXA Research Fund
Programme
AXA Socio Economic Risks Stream
Project Type
Research; Post Doctoral fellowship
Person Months
12
Project Title
 Faireacháin: A project for building a system for monitoring, evaluating and predicting behaviour of markets and of communities
From
December 2009
To
December 2012
Summary
The dynamics of financial markets rely critically on the sentiment of the stakeholders involved. Currently, the focus is on quantitative indicators of market dynamics - prices, volumes of shares or currency sold/bought. The objective of the Faireacháin project is to incorporate qualitative indicators of the dynamics - the sentiments articulated in news/blogs and in consumer confidence surveys - in decision making processes of the stakeholders. The proposed Faireacháin project brings together the methodology of Ahmad and Kearney (A&K) for studying volatility of markets caused by changing sentiments.. Since 1997, both researchers have published extensively in the fields of market volatility and sentiment and have received 4 EU/UK grants for their research in sentiment analysis. The A&K methodology will be used to empower Treocht Ltd.'s financial trading system for incorporating market sentiment in the reports and buy/sell signals generated by Treocht's system. The sentiment-enhanced system will generate revenue by using the click-ad model and by direct sales to individual and corporate clients. Market research shows a significant export potential for the Treocht's sentiment-enhanced trading system especially in the USA. The export-led revenue generation will help Treocht to employ up-to 20 high-tech professionals in Ireland. This is a collaborative project Prof K. Ahmad (School of Computer Science and Statistics) and Prof C. Kearney (School of Business). The spin-off company, Trecoht Ltd., has been awarded a High Potential Start-up status by Enterprise Ireland.
Funding Agency
Enterprise Ireland & Treocht Ltd
Programme
Innovation Partnership Programme
Project Type
Research and Technology Exploitation
Person Months
48
Project Title
 REVEAL
From
2005
To
2008
Summary
Recovering Evidence from Video by Fusing Video Evidence Thesaurus & Video Meta-Data (£126,556)(EPSRC GR/S98450/01)
Funding Agency
UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Programme
Think Crime Prevention and Detection
Project Type
Research
Person Months
36

Page 1 of 6
Details Date
Director, Treocht Ltd, A Trinity Spin-off Company 2009-2012
External Examiner for PhD theses at the Universities of Helsinki, Manchester, Nottingham-Trent, Sheffield and at Copenhagen Business School
Technical Director, InKE Ltd, Guildford 1994-96
Consultant, Advanced Mechanics and Engineering Ltd 1988-92
Consultant, the former UK National Rivers Authority 1994
UNDP/UN-FAO, Technology Transfer (TOKTEN) Consultant to the Planning Commission, Government of Pakistan 1985-1991
Member, nominated by the then DHSS, Surrey Family Practitioners' Committee 1986-1991
Language Skill Reading Skill Writing Skill Speaking
English Fluent Fluent Fluent
Urdu Fluent Fluent Fluent
Details Date From Date To
Member & Chair, Prioritization Panel for Biologically Inspired Computing of the EPSRC(February & July 2004)
Member, UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council 's (EPSRC) College of Computing 2002 2009
Fellow, British Computer Society 2005
Jiachuan Wang and Khurshid Ahmad, AI-Based Facial Expression Analysis of Federal Reserve Press Conferences and Intraday Market Reactions, 11th Future Technologies Conference 2026, Berlin, Germany, 15-16 October 2026 i, edited by Kohei Arai , Springer, 2026, pp1 - 21, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Darren Scott, Viren Chhabria,., & Khurshid Ahmad., Dynamics of Sea-Level Pressure and Wind Velocity: A Study of Volatility at Airports Using Statistical Time-Series Analysis., 2024 Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys), Amsterdam, The Netherlands., 5-6 September 2024, edited by Kohei Arai , 3, Springer, 2024, pp446 - 464, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Datta, D., Jiang, W., Vogel, C., & Ahmad, K, Speech Emotion Recognition Systems: A Cross-Language, Inter-racial, and Cross-Gender Comparison, Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC), San Fancisco, 2-3 March 2023, edited by Kohei Arai , 1, Springer Nature, 2023, pp375 - 390, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Murali, Yatheendra Pravan Kidambi, Carl Vogel, and Khurshid Ahmad., Head Orientation of Public Speakers: Variation with Emotion, Profession., Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC), Virtual, 2-3 March 2023, edited by Kohei Arai , 2, Springer, 2023, pp79 - 95, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Carl Vogel & Khurshid Ahmad, Agreement and disagreement between major emotion recognition systems, Knowledge-Based Systems, 276, 2023, p110579-, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  TARA - Full Text  URL
Ahmad K., Wang S., Vogel C., Jain P., O'Neill O., Sufi B.H., Comparing the Performance of Facial Emotion Recognition Systems on Real-Life Videos: Gender, Ethnicity and Age, Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2021, Future Technologis Conference- FTC 2021, Vancouver, Canand & ONLINE, 28-29, edited by Arai, K. , 1, Springer, 2021, pp193 - 210, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Ammar Qureshi and Khurshid Ahmad, Agents and Secure Contracts in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Simulation, Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2021, Future Technologis Conference- FTC 2021, Vancouver, Canand & ONLINE, 28-29 October 2021, edited by Arai, K. , 1, Springer, 2021, pp533 - 551, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI  URL
Jiachuan Wang,Tanmay Bagla,Sneha Srivastava, Adam Teehan, Khurshid Ahmad, Market Movements at High Frequencies and Latency in Response Times, Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2021, Future Technologis Conference- FTC 2021, Vancouver, Canand & ONLINE, 28-29 October 2021, edited by Arai, K. , 1, Springer, 2021, pp943 - 961, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI  URL
Khurshid Ahmad, 'DID THE MARKET MOVE FOR YOU? ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & FINANCIAL AND COMMODITY TRADING', London, England., Z/Yen Group Ltd., 41 Lothbury London EC2R 7HG United Kingdom, 2021, -, Digital research resource production, PUBLISHED  URL  URL
Khurshid Ahmad, Social computing and the law: Uses and abuses in exceptional circumstances., Cambridge (UK) & New York (USA), Cambridge University Press, 2018, 1 - 170pp, Book, PUBLISHED  URL
  

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Robert Remus and Khurshid Ahmad, Stimmungen in deutschsprachigen Nachrichten, Blogs und dem DAX, Terminologiemagzin, (1), 2010, p24 - -27, Journal Article, PUBLISHED
Rafif Al-Sayed & Khurshid Ahmad, Knowleldge Sharing in a Community of Practice: A Text-Based Approach in Emergent Domains, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management, American University of Dubai, UAE, 21-22 November 2005, edited by Dan Remenyi , 2005, pp30 - 41, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Ahmad K., Invited Keynote Speech: Checking up and looking in: Self plagiarism in science and technology , Language & Law: east meets West, University of Łódź (Poland), 12th-14th September, 2005, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
Ahmad, K, 5th International Conf. on Terminology and Knowledge Engineering, 2005, Meetings /Conferences Organised, PUBLISHED
Ahmad, K, 9th Int. Conf. on Information Visualisation, 2005, Meetings /Conferences Organised, PUBLISHED
Ahmad, K. & Ajala E., Learning about an Emergment Domain, Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Intellectual Capital & Knowledge Management, Toronto, 29-30 Oct, edited by D. Remenyi , 2004, pp309 - 318, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Ahmad, K, 8th Int. Conf. on Information Visualisation, 2004, Meetings /Conferences Organised, PUBLISHED
Ahmad, K., Manomaisupat, M. and Vrusias B., Automatic Text Classification and LSP terminology, Proceedings of the 14th European Symposium on Language for Special Purposes, LSP 2003, 2004, pp400 - 404, Notes: [(ISBN: 1-84469-007-5)], Meeting Abstract, PUBLISHED
Ahmad, K, 13th European Conference on Language for Special Purposes, 2003, Guildford, Surrey, Meetings /Conferences Organised, PUBLISHED
Ahmad, Khurshid., Scientific Texts and the Evolution of Knowledge - the need for a critical framework, Scientiae I - Proceedings of the 13th LSP, Vassa, Finland, August 20-24, 2001, edited by Koskela, M., Lauren, C., Nordman, M., & Pilke, N. Porta , Vaasa:Univ.of Vassa Publications Unit., 2002, pp123 - 135, Notes: [(ISBN 951-683-980-0)], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED

  


Page 1 of 6
Award Date
Fellow of the British Computer Society 2004
Fellow of Trinity College Dublin 2012
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Terminology and Ontology; Knowledge Acquisition; Expert Systems. GENERATIVE AI MODELLING: Cancer detection using Vision Transformers. MULTI-MODAL DATA ANALYSIS & DATA FUSION: Construction and analysis of large domain specific corpora comprising video, voice, and text data using machine learning. Creation of systems dealing with verbal and non-verbal communications. NEURAL NETWORKS: Multi-net neural computing systems, simulation of developmental and of degenerative systems. BEHAVIOURAL FINANCE: Affect and sentiment analysis. Impact of facial and voice emotion on market volatility. Sentiment analysis of domain specific news and opinion texts. VOLATILITY MODELLING: Volatility and dynamics of financial and commodity assets in high frequency time series. Volatility modelling of weather variables dealing with wind shears. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT: Discovery and Innovation; Knowledge Transfer especially best practice.