Dr Lighton Phiri has taken up a one-year Visiting Researcher position in Road and Railway Engineering at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture (BUCEA), under the National Key Research and Development Program of China project AI-Driven Road Resilience Enhancement Technology.
On October 27, 2026, he delivered an invited talk at BUCEA on the DataLab Research Group's artificial intelligence work, centred on the pothole-detection research carried out in the Road Safety in Zambia project. The visit followed his participation in the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) AI Compute Faculty Development Initiative from October 12 to 23, 2026.