I am the Associate VP of Research and professor of ML and professor of CS at MBZUAI, as well as a professor at McGill University. I am also co-founder and Chief Scientist of Palona AI. I was VP R&D, Chief Scientist, and Co-Director of the Samsung AI Center Montreal from 2019 to 2024. I was also the Chief Scientist of Tinder Inc., leading its research innovation from 2016 to 2019 and seeing its phenomenal growth (valuation from $1.8 billion to $12 billion). I am a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of IEEE. I have been conducting innovative research and product development through 3 roles in both academia and industry. (1) as an Professor, Educator, and Executive in Universities in Canada, US, and the Middle East; (2) as a Leader and Researcher in industrial research labs and companies' R&D divisions; (3) as a hands-on Practitioner/Entrepreneur/Advisor in high-tech companies ranging from startups to blue-chip companies. The goals of my work are: (1) Conduct high-impact research and innovations in IT targeting practical applications and real-world problems; (2) Technology transfer to the industry through entrepreneurship and industrial collaborations; (3) Engage in education and scholarly activities; motivating, advising, and helping students and young entrepreneurs to be successful. My academic research and industry innovations were covered by many news media and major online news forums. They have resulted in over 30 issued or pending US patents. I have authored/co-authored over 400 fully-referred publications in top venues in computer science and engineering and 4 books/monographs. The venues include: * Top AI/ML/NLP conferences: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, EMNLP etc. * Top Data Mining and Knowledge Management conferences: SIGKDD, ICDE, CIKM, etc. * Top Data Base and Big Data conferences: VLDB, ICDE etc. * Top Information Retrieval & Search Engines conferences: SIGIR, WWW, WSDM etc. * Top Cybersecurity & Cryptography conferences: IEEE S&P (Oakland), NDSS etc. * Top Networking & Systems conferences: MobiCom, Infocom, ICC, Globecom, SOCC, ICAC etc. * Top Applications and Human-Computer Interactions conferences: ACM Multimedia Conference (MM), Ubicomp, CHI, etc. * Top CPS, IoT, and Real-Time and Embedded Systems conferences: ICCPS, IoTDI, RTSS, RTAS etc. and various ACM/IEEE Transactions. My main expertise includes: * AI/Machine Learning and their Applications * Internet, Cloud Computing, and Web Technologies * Blockchain and Web3 * IoT and CPS * Sustainability and Smart Energy Systems