My research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, climate science and sustainable urban development. Through the Centre for Urban Informatics, Technology and Policy (CITY), we co-develop decision support systems with city governments, multilateral organisations and academic institutions, with a focus on urban mobility, air quality and climate resilience.
Current research areas:
- AI and machine learning for spatiotemporal data: interpretable and scalable models for traffic forecasting, ride-hailing demand prediction and super-resolution of climate and weather data
- Climate modelling and high-performance computing: exascale climate emulators using spherical harmonic transforms and mixed-precision GPU computing (2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize), and spatial statistics on the sphere
- Air quality and urban environment: GIS-based emission hotspot mapping, Low Emission Zone design for Lahore, smog and aerosol dynamics, land surface temperature and urban green space analysis
- Remote sensing and computer vision: tree cover estimation, flood mapping from multispectral satellite imagery, building footprint extraction and population disaggregation
- Urban mobility and intelligent transportation: travel demand management, active traffic management and road safety
- Energy, environment and health: renewable energy systems, IoT-enabled monitoring, and clean household energy for cooking and heating and its impact on air pollution and health
- Industrial AI and Industry 4.0: machine vision for quality inspection and defect detection, predictive maintenance and digital transformation of industries
- Edge AI and applied large language models: AI on low-resource devices for health, education and agriculture
- Signal processing on the sphere: spatio-spectral analysis, Slepian functions and computationally efficient algorithms, with applications in geophysics, cosmology, acoustics and medical imaging
- AI, education and policy: climate-related educational disruptions, online education, and AI literacy and strategy programmes for leadership teams
Ongoing projects, for your reference:
- Impact of Green Energy for Cooking and Heating on Household Air Pollution and Health in Rural Communities of Pakistan, Wellcome Trust, with Aga Khan University (2026 to 2028)
- Low Emission Zones and Congestion Zone Design through GIS Emission Hotspot Mapping
- Understanding Climate-Related Educational Disruptions in Pakistan Through the Lens of Data, Inequality, and Policy, DARE-RC (FCDO)
- Edge AI Lab, with the National AI Hub at LUMS, supported by the Gates Foundation
- Erasmus+ CBHE RAPID project on online education in Pakistani universities (concluding October 2026)
- Industry collaborations in machine vision and digital transformation with Tetra Pak and Bulleh Shah Packaging
Websites
| Title | Publication | Author | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| MnS@nZVI-polymeric resin for sustainable selenium oxyanions removal from water: Bridging experimental evidence, mechanistic insights, density functional theory, and life cycle assessment | Chemical Engineering Journal | Abbasi M., Rizvi O.S., Javed A., Javed H., Toor A.R., Hussain S.Z., Jilani A., Khalid Z., Khan E., Abbas T., | 2026 |
| Assessing the impact of industrial areas on land surface temperature: A comparison with urban and green spaces in the context of global warming | Sustainable Cities and Society | Toor A.R., Khalid Z., | 2026 |
| Slepian Basis for Efficient Representation of Order-Limited Signals on the Sphere | IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing | Khan M.S.A., Khalid Z., | 2026 |
| Identification and Quantification of Aerosol Hot-spots over Lahore Region using MODIS Data | International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS | Ashraf S., Khalid Z., Tahir M., Uppal M., | 2025 |
| Geographically Generalisable Urban Green Space Segmentation for Developing Countries | International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS | Butt M., Siddique N., Naweed F., Khalid Z., | 2025 |
| Spatiotemporal Air Quality Mapping in Urban Areas Using Sparse Sensor Data, Satellite Imagery, Meteorological Factors, and Spatial Features | International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS | Ahmad O., Khalid Z., Tahir M., Uppal M., | 2025 |
| A Tuning-Fork Network for Improved Building Footprint Extraction | International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS | Waseem M.A., Tahir M., Khalid Z., Uppal M., | 2025 |
| Logistics Hub Location Optimization: A K-Means and P-Median Model Hybrid Approach Using Road Network Distances | Transportation Research Procedia | Rahman M.A., Basheer M.A., Khalid Z., Tahir M., Uppal M., | 2025 |
| Evaluating the Cooling Efficacy of Urban Green Spaces during Extreme Heat Events | International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS | Waseem M.A., Basheer M.A., Nazir U., Uppal M., Tahir M., Khalid Z., | 2025 |
| Efficient Sampling and Accurate Reconstruction of Order-Limited Spherical Signals | IEEE Signal Processing Letters | Khan M.S.A., Nadeem S., Khalid Z., | 2025 |
| Robust and Noise-resilient Long-Term Prediction of Spatiotemporal Data Using Variational Mode Graph Neural Networks with 3D Attention | Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks | Ahmad O., Khalid Z., | 2025 |
| Unraveling Smog Dynamics in Lahore, Pakistan | International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS | Toor A.R., Javed H., Khalid Z., | 2025 |
| Boosting Earth System Model Outputs And Saving PetaBytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators | International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking Storage and Analysis Sc | Abdulah S., Baker A.H., Bosilca G., Cao Q., Castruccio S., Genton M.G., Keyes D.E., Khalid Z., Ltaief H., Song Y., Stenchikov G.L., Sun Y., | 2024 |
| Efficient Stochastic Generators with Spherical Harmonic Transformation for High-Resolution Global Climate Simulations from CESM2-LENS2 | Journal of the American Statistical Association | Song Y., Khalid Z., Genton M.G., | 2024 |
| Fast and Accurate Spherical Harmonic Transform for Spatio-Temporal Regular Grid Data | IEEE Signal Processing Letters | Chowdhury J., Khalid Z., Genton M.G., | 2024 |
| A Review on Congestion Mitigation Techniques in Ultra-Dense Wireless Sensor Networks: State-of-the-Art Future Emerging Artificial Intelligence-Based Solutions | Applied Sciences Switzerland | Umar A., Khalid Z., Ali M., Abazeed M., Alqahtani A., Ullah R., Safdar H., | 2023 |
| On the performance of hybrid beamforming for closely-spaced and randomly located users | Wireless Networks | Kayani A., Woodward G.K., Khalid Z., Naqvi I.H., | 2023 |
| Overcomplete Multiscale Dictionary of Slepian Functions for HEALPix on the Sphere | IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing | Aslam A., Khalid Z., | 2023 |
| Sampling Order-Limited Signals on the Sphere | ICASSP IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings | Khan M.S.A., Nadeem S., Khalid Z., | 2023 |
| Improved Flood Mapping for Efficient Policy Design by Fusion of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Landsat-9 Imagery to Identify Population and Infrastructure Exposed to Floods | International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS | Nazir U., Waseem M.A., Khan F.S., Saeed R., Hasan S.M., Uppal M., Khalid Z., | 2023 |
| Accurate prediction of remaining useful life for lithium-ion battery using deep neural networks with memory features | Frontiers in Energy Research | Tarar M.O., Naqvi I.H., Khalid Z., Pecht M., | 2023 |
| FEATURE SELECTION ON SENTINEL-2 MULTI-SPECTRAL IMAGERY FOR EFFICIENT TREE COVER ESTIMATION | International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS | Nazir U., Uppal M., Tahir M., Khalid Z., | 2023 |
| PD-SEG: Population Disaggregation Using Deep Segmentation Networks for Improved Built Settlement Mask | International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS | Rahman M.A., Waseem M.A., Khalid Z., Tahir M., Uppal M., | 2023 |
| LAST MILE LOGISTICS: IMPACT OF UNSTRUCTURED ADDRESSES ON DELIVERY TIMES | International Archives of the Photogrammetry Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS Archives | Abdul Rahman M., Aamir Basheer M., Khalid Z., Tahir M., Uppal M., | 2022 |
| OPERATOR FORMULATION FOR LINEAR TRANSFORMATIONS AND SIGNAL ESTIMATION IN THE JOINT SPATIAL-SLEPIAN DOMAIN | ICASSP IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings | Aslam A., Khalid Z., | 2022 |