Muhammad Afzal Upal is a writer and a cognitive scientist with contributions tocognitive science of religion,[1] machine learning for planning,[2][3] andagent-based social simulation.[4]
He was born inPakistan with 2 sisters and 3 brothers. His family emigrated to Canada becauseAhmadiyya, the form of Islam they practiced, was discriminated against in Pakistan.[5] For his PhD research, he worked under the supervision of Professor Renee Elio at theUniversity of Alberta. In December 1999, he successfully defended his thesis on "Learning to Improve the Quality of Plans Produced by Partial-order Planners".[6]
He was chair of the First International Workshop on Cognition and Culture, the 14th Annual Conference of the North American Association for Computational, Social, and Organizational Sciences, and the AAAI-06 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Agent-based Social Simulation.[7]
In July 1999, Upal was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor of computer science atDalhousie University's new Faculty of Computer Science. In 2001, he moved to Information Extraction & Transport (IET) Inc. to work as a senior scientist on variousDARPA sponsored projects to developBayesian network based decision-aid systems. In July 2003, he joined theUniversity of Toledo's Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Department as a tenure track assistant professor to teach computer science. From 2008 to 2017, he worked as a defense scientist atDefence R & D Canada's Toronto Research Centre.[8] From 2017 to 2020, he served as the head of the Computing and Information Science atMercyhurst University.[9] From 2020 to 2023, he has worked as the Chair of the Computer Science & Software Engineering Department atUniversity of Wisconsin-Platteville.[10][11] Since 2023, he has served as the associate dean ofJames Madison University's College of Integrated Science and Engineering.[12]
He has contributed to research areas ofCognition & Culture andCognitive science of religion through the development of theContext-based model of minimal counterintuiveness.[13][14] In a 2005 article in theJournal of Cognition and Culture, he proposed acognitive science of new religious movements.[15] Upal has also pioneered a knowledge-richagent-based social simulation technique for simulating the development of complex cultural beliefs.[16] In 2017, his bookModerate Fundamentalists: Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at in the lens of cognitive science of religion, was published by DeGruyter Press. The book usesContext-based model of minimal counterintuiveness to explain counterintuitive claims of new religious movement founders such asMirza Ghulam Ahmad-the founder ofAhmadiyya Islam.[17] He co-edited the Brill Handbook of Islamic Sects & Movements with ProfessorCarole M. Cusack.[18]
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