Boards of Governance

Pr.Fakhreddine (Fakhri) Karray is the Provost and Professor of Machine Learning at the the Mohamed bin
Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), a first-of-its-kind graduate level, research-based artificial intelligence (AI) university. Before joining MBZUAI, Fakhri served as the founding co-director of the University of Waterloo AI Institute. He has held the Loblaws Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Fakhri’s research interests are in the areas of operational AI, cognitive machines, natural humanmachine interaction, autonomous and intelligent systems. Applications of his research include virtual care systems, cognitive and self-aware machines/robots/vehicles, predictive analytics in supply chain management and intelligent transportation systems. Recent work of Fakhri and his research team on deep learning-based driver behavior recognition and prediction has been featured on The Washington Post, Wired Magazine, Globe and Mail, CBC radio and Canada’s Discovery Channel. He was recently honored by the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) for his novel work on improving traffic flow prediction using weather Information in connected cars through deep learning and tools of AI and received the Society’s 2021 Best Land Transportation Paper Award.

Fakhri is the co-author of a textbook on applied artificial intelligence: Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems Design (Pearson Education Publishing, 2004), and the co-author of a textbook on Elements of Dimensionality Reduction and Manifold Learning (Springer, 2022). He has published extensively in the general field of pattern analysis and machine intelligence and is the author of 20 US registered patents. He is the Associate Editor (AE) of flagship journals in the field of AI and intelligent systems, including the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. He served as the AE and Guest Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine and IEEE Access (special issue on IoMT). He also serves on several editorial boards of AI-related journals and has served as the General Chair/Program Chair for international conferences in the field of intelligent systems. Fakhri is the co-founder and Chief Scientist of Yourika.ai, a provider of AI based online learning systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada and a Fellow of the Kavli Frontiers of Science (a renowned research and symposium program of the US National Academy of Sciences). He received his PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, and completed his engineering degree at the National Engineering School of Tunis, Tunisia.