Muhammad Umair Nasir

PhD Student @ University of the Witwatersrand
muhammad.nasir@wits.ac.za

I am a PhD student at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. I am a member of the RAIL Lab research group and NYU Game Innovation Lab research group. I am honoured to be advised by Dr. Steven James and Prof. Julian Togelius. My main research interest is in the intersection of AI and games, specifically Open-Ended Learning and Procedural Content Generation.

Experience

Nof1

Research Engineer (part-time)

Remote
Sep 2025 - Present

  • Researching intersection of LLMs and Evolutionary Algorithms for algorithmic trading.

Modl.ai

AI Research and Development Intern

Remote
Feb 2025 - Aug 2025

  • Researching and developing game-playing quality assurance bots.

University of the Witwatersrand

Sessional Lecturer

Johannesburg, South Africa
Jul 2024 - Present

  • Teaching "Data Visualisation and Exploration" to 119 Honours and Masters students.

Axon Corporate Services

Data Scientist

Johannesburg, South Africa
Feb 2023 - Apr 2024

  • Building data pipeline using Spark.
  • Building intelligent internal threshold checker to prevent showing wrong currency values to client.
  • Using Machine Learning tools to predict the causes of currency value threshold breaches.
  • Researching and developing LLM-based time series model for currency prediction.

Ominor AI

Associate Machine Learning Engineer

Johannesburg, South Africa
Dec 2021 - Dec 2022

  • Created end-to-end video-based real-time diabetes detection system.
  • Worked on BigQuery for data warehousing.
  • Used GCP to deploy machine learning algorithms.
  • Used GPT-3 to create a specific-niche article writer for a client.
  • Optimized for cost and inference to deploy large language models.
  • Worked with health-tech AI client to automate a diabetes coaching system to create a recommender system to recommend what interventions need to be applied.
  • Worked with logistics client to forecast total liter consumption by their fleet through fbprophet.

Aureks

Data Scientist Intern

Remote
May 2021 - Nov 2021

  • Worked on machine learning pipeline that uses Kmeans clustering to maintain semantically similar keywords in clusters.
  • Used spaCy for finding semantic similarities between words. Word embedding vectors were used to find the distance between the new keyword and the cluster.
  • Applied PCA for dimension reduction of word embedding vectors.
  • Passing the new words to the Fbprophet time series framework to predict Cost-Per-Click of the keywords.
  • Maintaining Data pipeline through MongoDB and pymongo.

Reliance Engineering Company

Site Engineer

Multan, Pakistan
Dec 2018 - Nov 2020

  • Manage onsite team installing high-voltage transmission lines.
  • Coordinate with external contractors to manage supply of the project.

ZTE Corporation

Electrical Engineer

Aug 2016 - Nov 2018

  • Supervise the installation of electrical components of a government-owned broadcast station.

Freelance Experience

Procedural Room Generation For Metavoidal

(https://yellowlabgames.itch.io/metavoidal)

Yellow Lab Games, South Africa
March 2023

  • Created a pipeline for room generation through GPT-3's OpenAI API.
    This also led to the research paper "Procedural PCG Through Large Language Models".

Wrote Chapters For The Book: "Data and AI"

(https://edgeeducation.com)

Edge Education, South Africa
December 2023

  • I am the lead author in the book named "Data and AI" which is targeted on 1st year undergraduate students.
  • I wrote four chapters for the book.

Built RAG Pipeline with Aleph Alpha's LLM

(https://ritza.co)

Ritza, South Africa
January 2024

Contributor to open-source web application: Baobab

(https://github.com/deep-learning-indaba/Baobab)

Baobab
Feb 2024 - present

Publications

Continuous Program Search

Matthew Siper, Muhammad Umair Nasir, Ahmed Khalifa, Lisa Soros, Jay Azhang, Julian Togelius
Accepted at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2026
Code will be released soon!

Contact Me

You can contact me at my email: muhammad.nasir@wits.ac.za