Biography

Dr. Naqi Sayed joined Lakehead University in August 2002 with an appointment to the Accounting Discipline in the Faculty of Business Administration. He holds a Masters of Business Administration from Pakistan and a Masters in Banking Management from the United Kingdom. He has gained extensive working experience in non-banking financial institutions and commercial banks in the area of small business and corporate finance. Prior to joining Lakehead University, Naqi taught Accounting and Management Accounting in Australia while working for his PhD in Accounting and Finance. Naqi received his Certified Management Accountant designation in Ontario, Canada in 2009. His teaching interests include management accounting, performance management and strategy. His management accounting publications and research interests include performance management, Balanced Scorecard and multi-criteria decision models. He has also published in the area of equity finance (especially venture capital), resource-based theory and accounting education.

Keynote Title: Business in Artificial Intelligence

Biography

Dr. Michael Beck is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Winnipeg with appointments in the Department of Physics and the Department of Applied Computer Science. He is actively engaged in interdisciplinary research that combines machine learning, deep neural networks, high-performance computing, image recognition, phenotyping, and automated agriculture. Dr. Beck leads the team Particuleye Technologies, which recently won first place in the Lake Winnipeg AquaHacking Challenge, earning $20,000 in seed funding for their innovative tool designed to improve microplastics testing and analysis. His research and innovation focus on developing advanced computational methods to address real-world environmental and technological challenges.

Biography

Sheraz Ahmed received his master’s and Ph.D degree in computer science from the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany. His Ph.D. topic is Generic Methods for Information Segmentation in Document Images. He has primarily worked on the development of various systems for information segmentation in document images.

He is currently working as a Senior Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH (DFKI), Kaiserslautern, where he is leading the area of Explainable AI (XAI) in Time Series, medical imaging, and Genome Analysis.

He have several publications on the said and related topics, including several journal articles and book chapters. His research interests include document understanding, explainable AI, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, genome analysis, and natural language processing.

Biography

Dr. Alkhateeb earned his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan, in 2004, and obtained his MSc and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Windsor, Canada, in 2011 and 2018, respectively. Before joining Lakehead University, he served as an Assistant Professor at Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Amman, Jordan, from 2021 to 2023. Prior to that, he held positions as an Assistant Professor and Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Windsor, Canada.

He is currently serving as a faculty member at Lakehead University, where his research focuses on developing AI-driven models to predict health outcomes related to various cancers and mental health states. His work involves integrating heterogeneous health data using embedding techniques and applying machine and deep learning approaches for analysis and prediction.

Prospective graduate students interested in working in multidisciplinary research teams are encouraged to contact him via email. Undergraduate students are also welcome to participate in projects focused on data analysis and algorithm development across various research domains.

Biography

Dr. T. Akilan received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Windsor, Canada. He is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Software Engineering at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada.

He joined Lakehead University in September 2019 and has since been actively involved in teaching and research. He has taught several undergraduate and graduate courses, including Large-Scale Data Analytics, Applied Computational Intelligence, Digital Signal and Image Processing, Deep Learning Theory and Models, Big Data Machine Learning Models, and Natural Language Processing under the Department of Software Engineering, as well as Deep Learning, Computer Programming I, Topics in Natural Language Processing, Graduate Project, Cloud Computing, and Mobile Computing Technology under the Department of Computer Science.

His research interests include object detection, action recognition, image and video processing and segmentation, information fusion, machine and deep learning, and natural language processing. Associate Professor, Department of Software Engineering, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada