Muhammad Haris Kaka Khel

Muhammad Haris Kaka Khel is a PhD Candidate and Part-time Lecturer at Atlantic Technological University (ATU) in Ireland, working within the Department of Computing and Intelligent Systems. He is supervised by Dr. Kevin Meehan (ATU Donegal), with co-supervisors Dr. Paul Greaney (ATU Donegal), Dr. Marion McAfee (ATU Sligo), and Dr. Sandra Moffet (Ulster University, Derry).

Haris completed his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering, with a major in Communication, from the University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2019. He then pursued a research-based master's degree at the University of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with one semester spent at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, through the Erasmus exchange program.

His research focuses on pedestrian trajectory prediction, behavioral modeling, social interactions, and dynamic scene analysis. His PhD research centers on the Pedestrian Adaptive Trajectory Hypothesis System (PATHS), which forecasts future paths of individuals by analyzing human behavior, past movements, social interactions, and environmental factors. Unlike traditional single-path models, his approach predicts multiple possible paths to account for human behavior uncertainties, making the framework robust for dynamic urban environments.

His publications reveal expertise in computer vision and deep learning applications for crowd analysis, developing innovative approaches using YOLOv4, BiLSTM networks, graph neural networks, and attention mechanisms. This work has significant applications in autonomous driving systems, urban planning, crowd management during large events, and smart surveillance systems.

Haris has been involved in the Intelligent Real-time Crowd Monitoring System Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Video and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) Data, sponsored by the Deputyship for Research and Innovation, Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia. Previously, he served as a Graduate Research Assistant at University Kuala Lumpur - British Malaysian Institute in 2022 and completed an internship at the Center of Intelligent Systems and Networks Research from March 2019 to February 2020.