Program — Thursday, September 17, 2026

All times are local (Pakistan Standard Time, Asia/Karachi). This schedule is provisional and will be updated as talk titles, abstracts and the panel topic are confirmed.

8:45–9:30am Registration and Seating of Participants
9:40–9:45am Recitation
9:45–9:50am Welcome Address
9:50–10:00am Opening Remarks
10:00–10:10am Souvenir Distribution
10:10–10:50am Keynote Presentation — Neuro-Symbolic NLP: Combining the Power of LLMs with Logic and Knowledge
Prof. Dr. Muhammad Rafi — Professor and Head of the Artificial Intelligence Department, FAST National University Karachi
10:50–11:30am Technical Talk — Introduction to Kaggle Models / Gemma and Competitions Overview
Mr. Adnan Zaidi — Chief AI Officer, PROXIMA.PK, and 2× Kaggle GrandMaster
11:30–11:50am Tea Break
11:50am–12:30pm Technical Talk — From Low-Resource to LLM-Ready: Building High-Quality Datasets for the Era of Large Language Models
Dr. Wazir Ali — CEO, SoloGenAI, and Assistant Professor, QUEST Nawabshah
12:30–1:10pm Technical Talk
Raza Abbas — Data Science and Analytics Consultant, Veeam Software
1:10–2:00pm Lunch and Prayer Break
2:00–2:05pm Introduction of Panelists
Prof. Dr. Mutee-u-Rahman, Moderator
2:05–2:35pm Expert Panel Discussion
Topic: NLP and AI: Latest Trends, Local Challenges, and the Road Ahead
Moderator: Prof. Dr. Mutee-u-Rahman

Panelists:
1. Dr. Ayaz Keerio — Director, IMCS, University of Sindh
2. Dr. Shaukat Wasi — Professor and Dean, Faculty of Computing, MAJU Karachi
3. Dr. Mukhtiar Ali Unar — Professor, Isra University Hyderabad
4. Dr. Mazhar Ali Dootio — Professor, Benazir Bhutto Shaheed University Karachi
5. Dr. Tafseer Ahmed Khan — Director, Centre for Research and Applications of AI Technologies
2:35–2:40pm Vote of Thanks / Closing Remarks
2:40–2:50pm Certificate Distribution
2:50–3:00pm Group Photograph