Muhammad Shahzad

Timeline

1. 2008–2015

   Ph.D. at Michigan State

   He earns a B.E. in electrical engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in 2008. At Michigan State University he completes a Ph.D. in computer science in 2015 under Alex Liu, with a dissertation on statistical and learning algorithms for the design, analysis, measurement, and modeling of networking and security systems.

2. 2015

   Joining NC State

   He joins NC State's computer science department as an assistant professor for the fall 2015 semester, with computer networking as his specialty and an interest in new sensing modalities for human activity and gesture recognition. In 2015, he also coauthors two MobiCom papers with Alex X. Liu and Wei Wang: 'Understanding and Modeling of WiFi Signal Based Human Activity Recognition' and 'Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals'.

3. 2016–2020

   Gestures from ambient light

   A $174,878 National Science Foundation award, beginning in May 2016, funds his project on recognizing human gestures from ambient light, which learns the pattern of light-intensity change for each gesture and then recognizes gestures in real time. The work appears as 'Gesture Recognition Using Ambient Light' in ACM IMWUT in 2018, and 'Recognizing Human Gestures Using Ambient Light' wins the best paper award at PICom in 2020.

4. 2018–2019

   Multi-user recognition over WiFi

   In 2018, he coauthors 'Multi-User Activity Recognition Using WiFi' at MobiSys with Raghav H. Venkatnarayan and Griffin Page. The IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing publishes 'WiFi based Multi-User Gesture Recognition' by Venkatnarayan, Shakir Mahmood and Shahzad in 2019.

5. 2020

   Mapping buildings from outside

   In April 2020, he and research assistant Usman Khan develop a system that maps a building's interior from outside, using radio-frequency equipment and machine learning approaches that turn sparse signal reflections into a complete map. The work is supported in part by the US Army Research Office and appears at IPSN in 2020 as 'RFMap: Generating Indoor Maps using RF Signals'.

6. 2023

   A Carla Savage Award

   In February 2023, NC State's computer science department names him one of the Spring 2023 winners of the Carla Savage Awards, which recognize outstanding achievement within the department. His nominators describe him as a caring educator and an excellent mentor.

7. 2025–2026

   Reinforcement learning and CO-EVOLVE

   In May 2025, he and Jinming Xing post to arXiv a deep reinforcement learning framework, ASC, that lets any application set the objectives its TCP traffic should achieve, such as latency, packet loss or jitter. In March 2026, the pair post CO-EVOLVE, a framework in which a graph neural network and a large language model feed each other structural and semantic signals on heterophilous graphs.

8. As of October 2026

   Associate professor at NC State

   He is an associate professor in NC State's Department of Computer Science and leads the Wolfpack Interactive, Sensing, and Networking Lab, with research on sensing, networking and security and the application of AI to these domains. In May 2026, RFC 9944, which he coauthors with Hassan Iqbal and Eliot Lear, is published as an IETF Proposed Standard that defines schema extensions to SCIM for provisioning devices.