Zafar Ayyub Qazi's Homepage
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Zafar Ayyub Qazi

Assistant Professor at LUMS

Director: Distributed and AI Systems Lab
Co-Director: Internet,Data, and Society Lab

Email: zafar.qazi [at] lums [dot] edu [dot] pk

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About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at LUMS.

My research centers on the Internet, with a focus on making it more equitable and safe. I currently work on improving Internet affordability, online child safety, privacy, and democratizing access to Large Language Models. Additionally, I tackle architectural and system challenges in 5G/6G networks to support emerging applications.

Prior to LUMS, I was a postdoc with Sylvia Ratnasamy and Scott Shenker at UC Berkeley. I received my PhD at State University of New York where I worked with Vyas Sekar and Samir Das.

News

  • 01/24: Thrilled to announce our study on ad analysis in child-focused YouTube content has been accepted at TheWebConf 2024
  • 01/24: Delighted to share that our research on analyzing YouTube Ads through an affordability lens has been accepted at TheWebConf 2024
  • 08/23: My student, Mukhtiar Ahmad, has defended his PhD thesis. It has been a pleasure working with such an outstanding student.
  • 06/23: I am humbled and honored to have been awarded the University-Wide Teaching Excellence Award at LUMS
  • 05/23: Delighted to share that our work on designing a framework for improving Web affordability has been accepted at ACM SIGCOMM 2023
  • 05/23: Our work on making federated learning more inclusive has been accepted at ECML PKDD 2023
  • 02/23: Exciting news! our work on the affordability of public service websites will appear in TheWebConf 2023
  • 09/22: Delighted to share that our work on accelerating edge applications over 5G has been accepted in ACM CoNEXT 2022
  • 09/22: Our work on understanding the impact of memory pressure on mobile video performance accepted in ACM CoNEXT 2022
  • 08/22: Delighted to share that our work on the causal impact of Android Go on Mobile Web performance accepted in ACM IMC 2022
  • 08/22: Our work on low latency and consistent cellular control plane to appear in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
  • 10/21: Delighted to share that my PhD student Mukhtiar Ahmed has won the SBARA research award at LUMS.
  • 08/21: Our proposal for rethinking Web for affordability and inclusion accepted in ACM HotNets 2021
  • 08/21: I had the honour to serve in some great TPCs this year: SIGCOMM, HotNets, and SoCC.
  • 04/21: I'm honored and humbled to have been recognized by AI 2000 in their list of most influential scholars for the last decade. Grateful to my collaborators and students who made this possible.
  • 05/20: Our work on the design of a new control plane for cellular networks accepted in ACM SIGCOMM 2020 . Congratulations to Neutrino team at LUMS!
  • 01/20: Our work deconstructing Google's Web Light Service to appear in WWW 2020
  • 09/19: LUMS will be hosting the National Center for Big Data and Cloud Computing . I will be leading the 5G efforts in the Distributed Computing Lab.
  • 06/18: I'm honored to receive Google Faculty Research Award.

    Publications

    Teaching

    Assistant Professor, LUMS
    • CS 6303: Topics in LLMs: Applications, Systems, and Impact (Fall 2024)
    • CS 582: Distributed Systems (Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2018)
    • CS 382: Network-Centric Computing (Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020)
    • CS 678: Topics in Internet Research (Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2018)
    • CS 6312: Privacy in the Digital Age (Fall 2019)
    • CS 4713: Introduction to the Internet: Architecture and Protocols (Fall 2018)
    • MBAS6012: Business After 5G (Fall 2022, For Second-Year MBA Students)

    Services

    TPC member for the following conferences
    • ACM SIGCOMM 2024
    • ACM CoNEXT 2023
    • ACM HotNets 2022
    • ACM HotNets 2021
    • ACM SoCC 2021
    • ACM SIGCOMM 2021
    • ACM COMSNETS 2021
    • ACM SIGCOMM 2019
    • ACM CoNEXT Student Worskhop 2018
    Reviewed papers for the following journals/conferences
    • ACM IMC 2023 (external reviewer)
    • ACM HotNets 2020 (external reviewer)
    • ACM SIGCOMM CCR
    • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
    • IEEE Internet Computing
    • IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
    Graduate Program Coordinator at LUMS (2021 - Present)

    Students

    Current

  • Mukhtiar Ahmad (PhD Student: 2018-Present)
  • Muhammad Tahir (Research Associate, co-advised with Prof. Ihsan Qazi)
  • Chaudhary Hammad Javed (MS, RA)
  • Nida Tanveer (Undergrad)
  • Shazer Ali (Undergrad)
  • Muhammad Hamza Khawaja (Undergrad)
  • Shayan Ali Hassan (Undegrad)
  • Danish Athar (Undegrad)
  • Hafsa Akbar (Undergrad)
  • Muhammad Ayain (Undergrad)
  • Danish Humair (Undegrad)
  • Hamna Shafqat (Undergrad)
  • Wajiha Naveed (Undegrad)
  • Sheikh Hamza Elahi Sodana (Undergrad)
  • Muhammad Khawaja Gul (Undergrad)
  • Taha Cheema (Undergrad)
  • Abeer Ali (Undergrad)

    • Alumni

  • Rumaisa Habib (PhD Student at Stanford University)
  • Emaan Bilal (MS Student at MIT)
  • Mutahar Ali (PhD Student at UC Irvine)
  • Emaan Atique (PhD Student at UIUC)
  • Taimoor Tariq (PhD Student at UIUC)
  • Muhammad Jazlan (PhD Student at UC Davis)
  • Muhammad Ahmed (PhD Student at Cornell University)
  • Sarah Tanveer (PhD Student at University of Wisconsin Madison)
  • Saad Sher Alam (MS Student at UIUC)
  • Faaiq Bilal (PhD Student at University of Minnesota)
  • Talha Waheed (PhD Student at UIUC)
  • Muhammad Basit Iqbal Awan (PhD Student at University of Utah)
  • Syed Ali Nawazish (PhD Student at University of Utah)
  • Vafa Batool (PhD Student at Dartmouth)
  • Syed Usman Jafri (PhD Student at Purdue University)
  • Ammar Tahir (PhD Student at UIUC)
  • Maleeha Masood (PhD Student at UIUC)
  • Azam Ikram (PhD Student at Purdue University)
  • Muhammad Abdullah (PhD Student at EPFL)
  • Arsalan Jumani (Senior Software Engineer at Apple)
  • Abdul Manan (PhD Student at Brown University)
  • Ahmed Hassan (PhD Student at University of Southern California)
  • Ghulam Murtaza (PhD Student at Brown University)
  • Ahmed Faraz (PhD Student at Virginia Tech)
  • Adnan Abbas (PhD Student at Virginia Tech)
  • Abrar Tariq (PhD Student at University of Illinois)
  • Ehsan Latif (PhD Student at University of Georgia)
  • Haseeb Ahmed (MS Student at University of Waterloo)
  • Talal Touseef (MS Student at UIUC)
  • Anna Mazhar (MS Student at UIUC)
  • Mashal Abbas (MS Student at Waterloo)
  • Fizza Zafar (MS ETH Zurich)
  • Salman Munaf (MS Wisconsin Madison)
  • Osama Khurshid (MS Georgia Institue of Technology)
  • Wasiq Qasmi (Educative)

    Resources
  • [A collection of advices for junior faculty] by Jean Yang
  • [Advice] I got when I started my Ph.D.