Prof. Isam Hasan Zabalawi

SPEECH TITLE: Higher Education within the Context of Digital Transformation

Brief: using digital tools to deliver value and drive change in higher education

BIOGRAPHY

Prof. Isam Zabalawi was born in Amman, Jordan. He holds Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Leeds University of England. Prof. Zabalawi was the president of The Arab Academy for Banking & Financial Sciences since 2009 until 2016, he was also the founding President of International University for Science and Technology (IUST) in Syria 2005-2007. Prof. Zabalawi became the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research – Jordan 2003-2005. He was the Chancellor of the University of Sharjah from 1999-2003.

Prof. Zabalawi was the founding minister for establishing the German-Jordanian University in Jordan. He is a well-published research scholar. He was a research fellow with the German Academy of Exchange (DAAD) at the University of Karlsruhe, the Technical University of Hamburg, and the University of Erlangen, Germany. He is a member of many technical societies. he was the chairman of the HEREs (Higher Education Reform Experts) with the European Union Program ERASMUS+ in Jordan until Feb 2017. Prof. Zabalawi is a member of the Arab Thought Forum and a member of the World Affairs Council- Jordan

Prof. Alexey Myakov

SPEECH TITLE: Practical AI

Brief: the recent advances in AI are extraordinary, mind boggling, exciting and so on but how many of these AI findings get implemented in real life applications?

BIOGRAPHY

Alexey is a chief computer vision advocate and a general manager of the Intel’s newly created AI software R&D center in Dubai, UAE. He joined Intel in 2016 through acquisition of the computer vision company Itseez (the main developer of de facto standard in computer vision – OpenCV) where he was a co-founder and a CEO. At Intel, Alexey focuses on democratization of deep learning (DL), AI, and computer vision and leads business development and customer enablement for Intel’s GetiTM and OpenVINOTM products for AI DL/AI models creation and inference/deployment.

From 2006 to 2013, he served as Vice President of Business Development at MERA (now the Orion Innovation), where he led business development, sales, and marketing.

Previously, Alexey founded and served as CEO of 3 biomedical startups. A physicist and biomedical engineer by training he spent his early years as a scientist on early cancer diagnostics and contributed to the development of OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) modality.

Prof. Mohammad Odeh

SPEECH TITLE: The Evolution of Cancer Care into Reflectively Learning Systems of Systems: Insights and Challenges

Brief: information age not only into preemptive and precision medicine but also into predictive and participant cancer care

BIOGRAPHY

Mohammed Odeh, PhD: KHCC Professor of Cancer Care Informatics, King Hussain Center in Jordan and the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Mohammed was the first awardee of the Professorial title in Cancer Care Informatics in 2018. He co-founded with KHCC in Jordan the Cancer Care Informatics initiative and discipline in 2016 aligned with a number of offspring international deliverables including the 1st International Conference on Cancer Care Informatics in 2018, the 1st MSc in Cancer Care Informatics taught and research programme jointly run by King Hussein Cancer Center and the University of Jordan, with progression input from the University of West of England, Bristol, UK. Mohammed’s first research insights into the utilisation of informatics to empower the cancer patient journey dates back to 2002 and 2003 through the MammoGrid project and KHCC research through the development of process-modelling methodological approaches to improving cancer care processes, respectively. Mohammed was part of the co-investigators on the first EU Funded FP5 MammoGrid (€2.195M, the first EU FP5 funded intelligent medical grid prototype of federated databases of Mammograms) through UWE Bristol in partnership with Oxford University, Cambridge University Addenbrookes Hospital, and Mirada Solutions Limited in the UK, and in Italy through Universita Degli Studi Di Sassari, Insitituto di Radiologia Universita Degli Studi Di Udine, Universita Di Pisa, and in Switzerland through the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) as a partner and the project coordinator. Mohammed had founded and led the Software Engineering Research Group of the University of the West of England, Bristol in the period 2005-2020 and led the UWE Bristol MSc Software Engineering progarmme. He honorably has to his record 20 PhD successful completions with graduates in impactful graduate destinations as deans, associate deans, professors, associate and assistant professors, senior research and development managers in reputable institutions and enterprises such as Airbus. Mohammed has in-excess of 120 research articles as journal, book chapters and conference publications. He has a profile of more than 37 years of research and development experience in the engineering of mission and business critical software systems with an in-depth interest in Systems of Systems engineering applied to healthcare (and in particular cancer care) and aerospace, Knowledge-driven Requirements Engineering and Bridging the Gap between Business Processes and IT Systems. Mohammed has been acting as invited PhD examiner both nationally and internationally, a referee for the academic promotion of academic staff to professorial posts, invited keynote speaker in international conferences, and associate editor on international journals. He has been the UWE Bristol principal investigator on the OntoREM (Ontology driven Requirements Engineering Methodology) Airbus funded project and holds a US formally endorsed patent to his name jointly with Dr. Kossmann from Airbus. Mohammed has been on the Referees Panel of distinguished international prize committees such as the prestigious AbdulHameed Shoman Prize for distinguished Arab Researchers. Mohammed was co-organiser of the 5th IEEE CloudCom Conference in December 2013 and introduced the first Requirements Engineering for Cloud Computing (RECC) workshop in the IEEE CloudCom Conference. He was an associate editor of the INCOSE/Wiley Systems Engineering and sits on the editorial board of the IAJIT journal. Also, he is on the steering committee of the ACIT conference series. He has been UWE Bristol co-investigator on EU FP5, FP6 and FP7 projects. Mohammed was the programme leader and co-organiser of the 2015 EICM Conference in Bristol, UK. Mohammed has been on international higher education panels for reviewing research programmes, taught postgraduate and undergraduate programmes of internationally leading universities. He is the research project lead of the iOntoBioInformatics international consortuim and is co-founder of the international iOntoBioethics.org research group. Finally, Mohammed is looking forward for 1st international ambassadors to be awarded the MSc in Cancer Care Informatics in the next few months and for the forthcoming International Journal on Cancer Care Informatics, as co-founder and also as co-editor in-chief