ZaveenWaqar

I did every year of school at The City School. I was a regular student with one real edge: I spoke English well, and that was entirely my mother's doing.

Assist: Mom

Somewhere in O-levels I picked up a basketball and didn't put it down. By A-levels I'd joined a club, my evenings belonged to the court, and my grades paid for it.

I applied to universities in the UK and got into two. We couldn't afford either.

So I applied to NUST. Being a complete novice, I applied for exactly one discipline. I missed the cut by a hair, and with no second choice on the form, there was nowhere else to go.

Six months later I walked into COMSATS. It wasn't my first choice. It was supposed to be a stopover.

The plan was to reapply to NUST the next year. Then I found out COMSATS had a serious basketball scene, and the plan quietly died.

For two years, basketball came first and classes came a distant second. I played at HEC level, on the national inter-university circuit.

The computer science department had owned the inter-department title for years. I led Electrical Engineering to the title and ended their streak.

Then we did it again the next season. First lead of the game.

In basketball, a pivot is how you change direction without giving up the ball. After two years of barely passing, I pivoted.

My degree was Electrical and Telecommunication Engineering, but my attention kept drifting to robotics. Dr. Omer Ahmed noticed, and opened that world up to me.

Assist: Dr. Omer Ahmed

My first robot was an unmanned ground vehicle for search and rescue. It mapped unfamiliar spaces with SLAM using a Kinect depth sensor, and it could be driven remotely while streaming live video from a long way off.

It won at FIT, Frontiers of Information Technology, in 2016.

Then it won again at the university's CEPEX Open House in 2017.

In 2017 I walked into NUST, the university I'd missed by a hair five years earlier, for a Master's in Robotics & Intelligent Machine Engineering.

At the RISE Lab I worked on the lab's robots and built the application for a smart guidance robot that could lead visitors anywhere they needed to go. That project stalled before it shipped.

So I followed a new pull: machine learning, and a second mentor, Dr. Hasan Sajid.

Assist: Dr. Hasan Sajid

Meanwhile I took my first job, joining HyperNym as a graduate engineering trainee in IoT. I learned SoC firmware, designed PCBs in Altium and deployed hardware in the field. Our main product rode on petrol tankers and streamed their location and fuel level to a live dashboard.

When the job started crowding out my master's, I stepped away.

Then Dr. Sajid sent me to Lahore, to a textile mill that needed automatic fabric defect detection. I did it end to end: mounted the cameras, collected and annotated the data, trained the model, quantized it to run in real time on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2, and built a GStreamer pipeline that handled multiple 4K streams live.

It worked, and the way it came together is what got me my next job.