Dr Nazirul Hazim A. Khalim is a Lecturer in Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University Malaysia. His main research and public engagement concern data and democracy: how disinformation and platform algorithms affect elections and civic space in Southeast Asia and Europe.
He is a founding member of the Data & Democracy Research Hub, with colleagues at Monash University Indonesia and Australia, and a Chief Investigator on the ASEAN Disinformation Index, the European Commission’s SEED project on youth engagement against disinformation, and the Malaysia Narrative Change Lab, under which civil society organisations and journalists are trained in research methods. The findings have been presented to the Parliament of Malaysia and reported by Bernama, the national news agency.
His methods are econometric: time-series, volatility and causal-inference models, combined with machine learning and computational text analysis, are used to estimate how divisive content spreads, how volatility is transmitted between markets and how institutions shape inequality of opportunity. He applies the same methods in teaching, for which he has built free browser-based tools (Vector Studio, Econometrics Explorers, Econometrico and OSEM), and in industry, including a Ministry of Higher Education project on data-driven transformation with the HABIB Group.
He co-directs the Monash Complex Computational Modelling Laboratory and is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Monash University European Research Foundation in Prato, Italy. He also works on the arts of the Nusantara, including the films and songs of P. Ramlee, the cartoons of Lat and Malay heritage objects, curating exhibitions and applying phylogenetic methods to material culture. His research is funded by grants totalling more than AUD 1,070,000.
Patronymic name. A. Khalim is my father’s name, not a family surname. I go by Nazirul. Works are cited as A. Khalim, N.H.
Participant site for the five-day hands-on workshop at Monash University Malaysia: programme, materials, venue, travel and trainers. Organised with SPARKLE and the Peter Doherty Institute; completed with researchers from 18 organisations, including the Ministry of Health’s Institute for Medical Research.
2026 showcase at Monash University Malaysia, Library Exhibition Space: five teaching tools, twelve posters, the trailer and the VR study; 148 feedback responses were collected.
Curated and designed by Dr Nazirul Hazim: sixty years of Lat’s cartoons at Monash University Malaysia — the story, the exhibition, the 2024 conversation and the MONASH BY LAT collection (launch 20 October 2026).
An exhibition of the arts of the Malay world, from the 13th to the 20th century: destar, keris and textiles, with a public programme and references.
Heritage exhibition on the tanjak and destar, with public programme and scholarly context.
Site for the 50-year tribute at Monash University Malaysia: an exhibition, a charity concert and a research symposium on the life and art of P. Ramlee (1929–1973).
A 23-slide presentation on the lost treasures of P. Ramlee.
Research entity of the School of Business, approved in October 2026 under the campus AI Technology and Applications Research Network and co-directed with Professor Erniel B. Barrios. Eighteen academic members, ten projects across five themes and more than ten PhD students, with on-premise GPU workstations (RM 225,000 in equipment).
Quantifying disinformation’s effect on electoral integrity, participation, and civil liberties across ASEAN. Cross-campus collaboration (MUM–MUA–MUI). AUD 47.5 K MDFI grant.
EU CERV-funded multi-country (IT/DE/NL). Chief Investigator (one of 14). EUR 406,835.
ML and AI for market analysis and segmentation. PPRN 2.0, RM 287 K.
Immersive learning for OLS, projections, high-dimensional data. With UNSW Sydney.
Computational phylogenetics applied to keris, textiles, wayang kulit, destar. HCII 2025, Springer.
Netnography and sentiment analysis. IASPM-SEA, Bangkok 2024.
Keris, jewellery, textiles, wayang kulit, destar, music, and film. 30+ lectures and workshops with HARTA Space since August 2023. Includes computational phylogenetics and filmography research.
Quantifying disinformation’s effect on electoral integrity, civil liberties and participation across ASEAN. AUD 47.5K MDFI grant. Cross-campus MUM–MUA–MUI collaboration.
Chaired and organised Oct 2023 at Monash Malaysia. Keynotes from the Election Commission of Malaysia and IDEAS CEO. Multi-school, multi-campus collaboration with Monash Indonesia.
PRME Champion in Education seminar on how recommendation algorithms drive misinformation, political polarisation and manufactured consent — and how to push back.
30 Sep – 1 Oct 2025. Industry dialogue on digital transformation and democratic governance in the ASEAN region. Monash University Malaysia.
On 7 April 2026, Monash University Malaysia and HABIB presented their joint work at the Ministry of Higher Education’s Public-Private Research Network (PPRN) conference. The Ministry named Dr Nazirul Hazim A. Khalim as one of four invited speakers; he presented with Soon Jin Yee and Muhamad Aidan Bin Adam of Habib Jewelry Manufacturing Sdn Bhd.
The project was co-funded by MOHE and HABIB, a long-established Malaysian family jewellery business with plans to grow into a regional player. The team integrated the company’s data sources into a single database, automated routine data preparation and reporting, built machine-learning demand forecasts, and set up dashboards with automated stock alerts by product category and branch. The main application was inventory: finding slow-moving and aged stock, keeping high-demand items available, avoiding overstocking, and aligning procurement with forecast demand.
Technical problems were relatively easy to resolve; changing long-standing habits and intuitions in a family business took longer, and the project depended on HABIB’s willingness to make those changes. HABIB paid 70% of the project cost. We thank HABIB for the partnership and MOHE for supporting industry–university research through PPRN. The project forms part of the School of Business’s research on data-driven digital transformation.
| # | Year | Type | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 2026 | Chapter | Phylogeny of cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. LNCS 16342, Springer. |
| 02 | 2025 | Conf. | Modelling GenAI Breakthroughs on Stock Volatility in Asian Equity Markets. EAEA 20th Intl Convention, Manila. |
| 03 | 2025 | Conf. | Phylogeny of Cultural Heritage in Southeast Asia. HCII 2025, Gothenburg. [Session Chair] |
| 04 | 2024 | Conf. | Characterising Brain Connectivity in Terms of Contagion. IASC-ARS/CSAT, NTU Taipei. |
| 05 | 2024 | Conf. | Social Media, Controversy and Dissent in SEA Popular Music. IASPM-SEA, Bangkok. |
| # | Status | Title & target journal | Journal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | under review | Multi-Model Computational Phylogeny of Southeast Asian Limar Textiles: A CLIP, DINOv2 & Heritage-Feature Analysis | ACM JOCCH |
| 02 | under review | The Privilege of the Draw: Institutional Design and the Production of Inequality of Opportunity in Tournament Seeding | J. Economic Inequality |
| 03 | under review | Convergence Failures in Complex Innovation Systems: Why Multi-Strand Institutional Ecosystems Enable Growth but Suppress Innovation in an Emerging Economy | Technological Forecasting & Social Change |
| 04 | under review | Institutional Foundations of Monetary Policy Transmission in Malaysia’s Dual Banking System | Int’l J. Islamic & ME Finance & Mgmt |
| 05 | submitted | Disinformation as Democratic Voice in Southeast Asia | Journal of Democracy |
| 06 | under review | The Timelessness Signature: Participatory Cultural Memory & Engagement Dynamics in YouTube Comment Discourse on P. Ramlee | Memory, Mind & Media |
| 07 | submitted | LLM-Augmented Thematic Analysis of User-Generated Content: A Mixed-Method Framework for Digital Cultural Participation | J. Intercultural Studies |
| 08 | submitted | The Paradigm Spectrum Framework: Machine Learning-Based Continuous Classification of Research Philosophies | Quality & Quantity |
A peer review of teaching in September 2025 rated it effective or very effective on all four criteria.
A 65-item questionnaire in eleven sections on a seven-point scale, developed for a Monash L&T grant on barriers to inclusive teaching. After interviews with 18 academics in seven schools it was put into use in September 2026 as a campus-wide survey of academic staff.
Guest lecture for Southeast Asian Culture and Societies. Malay headwear as a lens for identity, status, and aesthetic exchange across the archipelago.
Guest lecture for Research Issues and Methodology. Topic modelling, embeddings and large-language-model pipelines applied to social research.
Guest lecture for Audience Studies. The persistence of P. Ramlee’s songs and films across generations, fieldwork on re-arrangement and reception.
Invited lecture / workshop on finding a meaningful academic purpose — delivered to RED summer cohort and policy partners.
Five teaching tools built in the Department of Econometrics & Business Statistics, Monash University Malaysia, and shown at the 2026 Innovative Education Showcase (28 Sep – 2 Oct, Library Exhibition Space). Each was written for a unit taught in the department and is used in one. The virtual reality work was funded by the School’s Learning Innovation Fund (2024) and a campus Learning & Teaching Grant (RM 24,000, 2025–26); the showcase drew 148 feedback responses.
Vector Studio draws the geometry of least squares in 3D, and the scene can be rotated by hand. When y is moved, its projection and residual update with it. It has fourteen concepts with a scene for each, a guided tutorial, a quiz and a Sandbox for building vectors, planes and operations from scratch.
166 interactive explorers for the teaching of Econometrics and Business Statistics, Business Analytics and Actuarial Analytics. Each is an interactive page on which every figure recomputes when an input is changed.
Econometrico runs econometric analyses through menus and dialogs. Every analysis is written out as both an R script and a Python script as the student works.
OSEM is a free application for PLS-SEM and CB-SEM. The model is drawn on a canvas and estimated in R on the user’s own machine. It has no licence fee and no cap on records, and it runs offline.
The Chatbot Generator turns a unit guide or a set of frequently asked questions into an assistant that answers student enquiries only from that material. Each assistant runs in the coordinator’s own Google account.
| # | Date | Talk / event | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 26 Nov 2026 | TransformED 2026 — “Modelling Playground: Interactive Browser-Based Explorers for Building Quantitative Intuition in Business Education” (oral, accepted) | Hilton Petaling Jaya |
| 02 | Jun 2026 | Simposium Harmoni 2026, Panel 2 — “Media Sosial & Teknologi: Cabaran Algoritma dan Polarisasi” (panellist; reported by Bernama) | Parliament of Malaysia |
| 03 | May 2026 | Kuala Sine: Cinema, Heritage and the City — panellist (KL Festival 2026) | REXKL, Kuala Lumpur |
| 04 | Apr 2026 | Beyond the Degree: Alumni Insights on Careers & Employability — moderator | Monash Malaysia |
| 05 | Apr 2026 | Building a Data-Driven Organisation: Data Warehouse, Machine Learning and AI for the HABIB Group — one of four invited speakers | MOHE PPRN Conference, Kuala Lumpur |
| 06 | Nov 2025 | Cross-party parliamentary group special information session with Meta & TikTok — invited expert (12 Nov) | Parliament of Malaysia |
| 07 | 2025 | TransformED 2025 — poster: Immersive Virtual Reality for Vector Geometry in Analytics and Engineering | TransformED |
| 08 | Jun 2025 | The Timelessness of P. Ramlee | Public lecture, Penang |
| 09 | May 2025 | Modelling GenAI Breakthroughs on Stock Volatility | EAEA, Manila |
| 10 | Apr 2025 | Data Futures Week — co-organiser | Monash Malaysia |
| 11 | Dec 2024 | Data & Democracy Dialogue | Jakarta (Monash Indonesia) |
| 12 | Oct 2024 | ASEAN SPDDM — Data & Democracy representative | Singapore |
| 13 | 2024 | TransformED 2024 — oral: Virtual reality in econometrics and analytics: interactive learning of vector geometry and data visualisation | TransformED |
| 14 | Oct 2023 | Prebunking fake news with the wisdom of the crowd | BFM / The Edge / press |
Sep 2024 · launch 20 Oct 2026LAT 60
28 Sep – 2 Oct 2026Innovative Education Showcase
21–25 Sep 2026SPARKLE Workshop
26 Jun 2026Simposium Harmoni 2026
12 Nov 2025Parliamentary session with Meta and TikTok
20–30 Jan 2026Madu Tiga ‘Live’ with the MPO
May 2023P. Ramlee 50-Year Tribute
2025Tanjak Warisan Jemala
Jun 2025Deconstructing P. Ramlee, Penang
30 Sep – 1 Oct 2025Data & Democracy Dialogue 2025
2023 – presentCosmopolitan Arts of the Nusantara series
Oct 2023Data & Democracy Forum
2022PRME Seminars on Data and Democracy
7 Apr 2026MOHE PPRN Conference
23 May 2026Kuala Sine: Cinema, Heritage and the City
29 Apr 2026Beyond the Degree: alumni panel
An article for a general readership on research with Ewilly J.Y. Liew and Andrei O.J. Kwok, based on a survey of 196 Malaysian startups: startups with abundant resources often innovate less than those with fewer.
A Bernama feature on Simposium Harmoni at the Parliament of Malaysia. It reports his findings from elections in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia: what spreads depends on reach and engagement, not on authenticity or reliability.
Bernama’s report of the same panel, carried by Daily Express Malaysia.
One of three guests, with Matteo Bonotti (Monash University) and Azmi Shahrom, Deputy Chairman of the Election Commission of Malaysia.
Takeaways from a private event on paid political influencing in Malaysia: how parties fund creators, how algorithms amplify divisive material, and where oversight is missing. The article argues for holding platforms responsible for their design, supporting quality journalism, strengthening digital literacy and bringing influencer promotions under electoral rules.
On BFM’s Inside Story (56 minutes), as organiser of the P. Ramlee 50-Year Tribute exhibition, symposium and orchestra concert, with the film critic Hassan Muthalib.
Earlier appearances on RTM, Dewan Budaya, Berita Harian and The Edge are listed under Talks & Media.
13-programme series — silat, gamelan, wayang kulit, keris, Malay textiles, jewellery, and P. Ramlee cinema. Organised with HARTA (Habib Jewels), Ampang.
HASS internal grant 2025. Boon Teck Road staff quarters and the history of Malay cinema.
Research grant 2023. Public lecture Penang 2025. Berita Harian and Dewan Budaya.
Guest lecture + workshops with HARTA Gallery. Cosmopolitan Arts Series.
Published HCII 2025, Springer LNCS 16342.
Official Research Partner — Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. Wrote the exhibition posters for Madu Tiga ‘Live’ (January 2026).
Netnography and sentiment analysis. Bangkok 2024.
Celebrating P. Ramlee with the Monash Chamber Orchestra (MCO)
