EEE DASE Alumnus (2011) Muhammad Haziq Bin Razali awarded prestigious A*STAR National Science Scholarship (PhD) to pursue research in Artificial Intelligence

07 Aug 2019

After graduating from Singapore Polytechnic in 2011, Haziq pursued his graduate studies in Engineering (EEE) at NTU from 2013 – 2016. In the course of his studies, he developed an interest in software systems and decided to take his Master’s Degree in Computer Science at Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne, Switzerland from 2017-2019. In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious A*STAR National Science Scholarship to pursue his PhD in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI). 
Haziq attributed his strong foundation in engineering to the broad-based curriculum in the DASE course in SP. He discovered his passion for AI when he joined the SP Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Control Centre (ARICC) to work on his Final Year Project. 

At ARICC, he took part in the RoboCup small sized league and was part of a team that programmed a 4-wheeled omni-directional "service-robot" to grab small objects from one place and place them at another fixed location. For him, the love came from seeing these robots behave with "human-like" intelligence. For the first time, he realized that the robots we often watched in the movies did not seem so far-fetched at all. During his early phase in DASE, he was not interested in programming and got low grades for his programming-related modules. But he believed his time at ARICC ultimately changed him and defined his path in life. Like many others, his story would not have been possible without the rigorous academic curriculum and learning opportunities provided in the SP DASE course.