Muhammad Shahzad

Muhammad Shahzad is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University and a member of the Networking Research Group. His research bridges systems and security with a focus on networking, security, and Internet of Things applications.

His educational background includes:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science from Michigan State University (2015)
• B.E. in Electrical Engineering from National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) (2008)

Shahzad's research spans networking, cyber security, and IoT with specific emphases on network measurement, RFID systems, activity recognition, and device authentication. His work extends to cyber-physical systems, embedded real-time systems, and human-computer interaction, frequently involving real-world experimentation and novel sensing techniques for practical security applications.

His recent publications (2023-2025) demonstrate interdisciplinary work across reinforcement learning for congestion control, blockchain scalability, data center power management, agricultural sensing via RF, urban mobility analysis, radar-based fruit detection, and non-intrusive network measurement - highlighting his focus on practical IoT and networking innovations.

Key recognitions include:

• Best Poster Award, IIUG (2017)
• Winner, Virginia Tech Spectrum Sharing Radio Challenge (2016)
• Fitch-Beach Outstanding Research Award (2015)
• Outstanding Graduate Student Award (2015)

His research is funded by NSF, Cisco, US Army, and Sony through projects including serverless edge computing, BLE onboarding, RF-based indoor mapping, and IoT performance measurement. Current work focuses on enabling stateful applications in serverless architectures, resource protection in cloud data centers, and human discovery through radio frequency signals.

He actively contributes to the Networking Research Group at NC State, advancing collaborative efforts in connected computing environments through both foundational research and real-world system deployments.