Dr Imad Gohar
- Lecturer
- School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence
Biography
Dr Imad Gohar is advancing the frontier of AI-driven computer vision and intelligent automation. He earned his PhD from Heriot-Watt University under the prestigious James Watt Scholarship, where his research focused on developing AI-powered visual inspection systems for wind turbine blades using drone imagery.
A recipient of multiple academic honours, Dr Imad has received several prestigious awards, including a Platinum Award for his voluntary contributions at Heriot-Watt University and a Gold Medal for his bachelor's degree. He has also received Best Presentation and Best Paper Awards at Heriot-Watt University and an IEEE international conference, respectively.
Besides his teaching and research responsibilities, Dr Imad also undertakes academic leadership roles at Sunway University. He serves as a Programme Committee Member for the Bachelor of Information Technology (BS IT) programme and as the Internship Coordinator for both the BS IT and Bachelor of Software Engineering (BS SE) programmes.
Previously, he served in academic and research roles at Heriot-Watt University, NUST, ITU, and CUST University, where he contributed to teaching, research, and academic initiatives. He also led the Samsung Innovative Campus programme and AI Summer School. His research spans wind turbine blade inspection and surface defect detection, smart infrastructure monitoring, remote sensing, affective computing, and human-centred sensing systems, with publications in international journals and conferences.
As an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA), Dr Imad is well-versed in modern pedagogical and quality assurance frameworks, including Outcome-Based Education (OBE), Table 4 preparation, Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), and rubrics development. He remains committed to advancing AI for sustainability, intelligent systems, and digital transformation.
Academic & Professional Qualifications
- PhD – Computer Engineering from Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering and Physical Science (EPS) Heriot-Watt University Malaysia (2025)
- Master - Computer Science from School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), National University of Science and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan (2019)
- Bachelor’s – Computer Science from Institute of Computer Sciences and Information Technology (ICS/IT) – The University of Agriculture Peshawar, Pakistan (2016)
Research Interests
- Computer Vision | AI-based Infrastructure Inspection | Affective & Multimodal Computing
- Vision-Language Models & LLMs | Diffusion Models | Multimodal Sensor Fusion | Knowledge Distillation
Teaching Areas
- Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
- Computer Vision
- Core Computer Science courses
- Digital Image Processing
- Programming Fundamentals with C++
- Ubiquitous Computing
- Data Visualization
Courses Taught
- Computer Vision
- Micro-credential in Computer Mathematics Fundamentals
- Principles and Practices of Data Science
- Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
- Programming Principles
- Database Management Systems
Notable Publications
- MEIA: Reliability-Aware Multimodal Learning for Joint Emotion, Intention, and Action Recognition – BMVC2026
Focus: Affective Computing, Multimodal Learning, LLM
SDGs: SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure - A Hybrid Vision-Language Architecture for Automated Defect Reasoning and Report Generation in Industrial Inspection – Arxiv 2026
Focus: WTB surface defect detection, LLM, Reasoning
SDGs: SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure - Transformer-Based Semantic Segmentation for Road Surface Damage Detection and Image-based Assessment – FCC2026
Focus: Infrastructure Monitoring
SDGs: SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities - Review of State-of-the-Art Surface Defect Detection on Wind Turbine Blades Through Aerial Imagery: Challenges and Recommendations – EAAI – IF 9.0
Focus: Green Energy
SDG: #7 - Affordable and Clean Energy and #13 - Climate Action - Slice-Aided Defect Detection in Ultra High-Resolution Wind Turbine Blade Images – MDPI Machines – IF 3.0
Focus: Green Energy, WTB Surface Defects
SDG: #7 - Affordable and Clean Energy, #9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, #13 - Climate Action - Automatic Defect Detection in Wind Turbine Blade Images: Model Benchmarks and Re-Annotations – ICMEW2023
Focus: Green energy
SDG: #7 - Affordable and Clean Energy, #9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure - Optimizing Wind Turbine Surface Defect Detection: A Rotated Bounding Box Approach – EUSIPCO2024
Focus: Green energy
SDG: #7 - Affordable and Clean Energy, #9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure - Person Re-identification Using Deep Modeling of Temporally Correlated Inertial Motion Patterns – MDPI SENSORS – IF 4.0
Focus: Wearable sensor, inertial signals, human movement modeling
SDG: #9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure - Two-Stream Deep CNN-RNN Attentive Pooling Architecture for Video-Based Person Re-identification – CIARPS2018
Focus: Surveillance system
SDG: #11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities, #9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure - Towards Intelligent Recycling: CNN-Based Trash Classification Using TrashNet Dataset – ICiMR2025
Focus: Surveillance System
SDGs: #11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities, #9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Achievements & Accolades
- Gold Medal (BS Computer Science)
- Platinum Award – PHD-HWU – 2025
- Best Paper Award (ISPACS 2025, Bandung, Indonesia)
- Best Presentation Award (HWU PGRC 2025)
- Heriot-Watt University, James-Watt Scholarship (Ph.D.)
Professional Associations
- Associate Fellow of Higher Education Agency (UK)
