Arslan Munir is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Kansas State University (KSU). He has been awarded the distinction of University Outstanding Scholar for lifetime in May 2024. He joined FAU as tenured Associate Professor in August 2024. Before joining FAU, he was a tenured Associate Professor at KSU. He also held a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) from July 2014 to June 2017. He was a postdoctoral research associate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA from May 2012 to June 2014. He received his M.A.Sc. in ECE from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada, in 2007 and his Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Florida (UF), Gainesville, Florida, USA, in 2012. He also worked as a visiting graduate research student at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada for one semester during his Ph.D. From 2007 to 2008, he worked as a software development engineer at Mentor Graphics (now part of Siemens) in the Embedded Systems Division. He also worked as a software engineer at Techlogix Limited in 2007.
Dr. Munir’s current research interests include embedded and cyber-physical systems, secure and trustworthy systems, computer architecture, artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, parallel computing, edge computing, quantum computing, quantum machine learning, and fault tolerance. He is a founding director of the Intelligent Systems, Computer Architecture, Analytics, and Security (ISCAAS) laboratory. His current research projects include designing a fog-assisted smart agriculture framework for multi-layer sensing and real-time analytics of water-nitrogen colimitations in field crops, Public Key Cryptography (PKC) and Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) based authentication and secret key establishment in smart grid, a multimodal attention-based deep learning framework for real-time activity recognition at the edge, design of secure and dependable autonomous vehicles and intelligent transportation systems, Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted spacecraft trajectory optimization and planning, and AI-enable situational awareness. His research accomplishments have been covered by various news and media outlets.
Dr. Munir was the recipient of many academic awards including the doctoral fellowship from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada and University Outstanding Scholar distinction for lifetime. He earned gold medals for the best performance in electrical engineering, gold medals and academic roll of honor for securing rank one in pre-engineering provincial examinations (out of approximately 300,000 candidates).
He has published more than 100 scholarly peer-reviewed articles related to his research interests in prestigious journal and conferences, with three of his research papers receiving Best Paper Awards and two more being selected as Best Paper Finalists. One of his papers also received an Outstanding Paper High Commendation Award from IEEE. He has authored a book on Modeling and Optimization of Parallel and Distributed Embedded Systems, which was published by Wiley-IEEE Press in 2016. Another of his authored book on Accelerators for Convolutional Neural Networks has been released in October 2023 by Wiley-IEEE Press. He also holds three U.S. patents. His name is included in the list of World’s Top 2% Scientists compiled by experts at Stanford University based on the data from Elsevier’s Scopus.
He has served as a program committee member and a reviewer for various IEEE and ACM conferences, a reviewer for various IEEE, ACM, and Elsevier journals, and a panelist for multiple National Science Foundation panels. He has served on the technical program committee of several conferences including ACM GLSVLSI, IEEE ICCD, IEEE iNIS, IARIA ICNS, IEEE CloudNet, IEEE MCSoC, and IEEE/IFIP EUC. He organized a panel on cybersecurity of smart grid and electric vehicle charging, and also served as a moderator for the panel in 50th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON), Chicago, Illinois, November 2024. He served as a Session Chair in IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), 2020, a Special Sessions Chair in IEEE International Symposium on Smart Electronic Systems in 2021, and a Special Sessions Chair in IFIP International Internet of Things Conference (IFIP-IoT) in 2023. He served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine from 2017 to 2022. He currently serves as an editor for the Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy, and AI journal. He also serves as a guest editor for Journal of Imaging, Entropy journal, and Algorithms journal. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
His research has been sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)/National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), National Science Foundation (NSF), and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). He has been awarded the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative award. He has also been awarded Summer Faculty Fellowships at AFRL, Information Directorate (RI) in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023.