University of East London's Provost joins our 'Innovation Cities' forum

Above: the Docklands campus of the University of East London (Copyright George Rex Photography)

Future Cities Forum is delighted that Professor Dr Hassan Abdalla, Provost of the University of East London, will be joining our panel discussion on the future of artificial intelligence research at 'Innovation Cities' in east London this month.

He is an international authority in the field of Smart/Future Cities, Disruptive Technologies, Brain Computer Interface (BCI), and Autonomous Systems with over 25 years' experience in both academia and industry.

Prior to his current appointment, he was Pro Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching and the College of Technology and Innovation; and Executive Dean of the School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering.

The University of East London is conducting high-level research in the broader area of Artificial Intelligence (AI), ranging from Fintech to stock market prediction, to computer vision to inventing scalable intelligent algorithms to solve the large-scale big data problem. The department is also producing cutting edge research in the areas of insurance fraud detection, recommender systems, cyber security using AI, and neural networks.

The University has strong research collaborations with other academic and industrial institutions; such as the University of Oxford, Queen Mary, University of Southampton, Accenture, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The university describes its research as participatory, inclusive, empowering, and impactful by design:

'It is driven by an urgent need to find long-lasting solutions to significant local and global challenges. By actively seeking collaboration, we develop partnerships with local government and community organisations to explore and address challenges, issues and concerns as articulated by our community partners. We encourage their active participation and inclusion during the development and delivery of research projects, emphasising collaboration to deliver sustainable problem-solving.

'Our focus on communities lies not only in East London but also abroad: we are working with governments, universities and NGOs in countries currently including India, Zambia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Brazil. We have selected a range of research highlights which demonstrate our strategy, our strengths and approaches and our commitment to engaging communities locally and globally. UEL is working hard with our collaborators to help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The Goals are 17 urgent calls-to-action to create a fairer, better world for the future.'

In the 2021 Times Higher Education Impact rankings, UEL was rated in the top 3 per cent for striving for Goal 5 - Gender Equality and the top 10 per cent for Goal 10 - Reducing Inequalities, out of 1,117 institutions from 94 countries.

Professor Abdalla is a Principal Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the British Royal Society for Arts (FRSA). He is a member of the Editorial Board of several international journals. He won several awards nationally and internationally in recognition of his original contribution to research, academia and industry.

Professor Abdalla has been leading major research projects nationally and internationally in partnership with world-class universities and industry. He published over 150 papers world-wide, supervised over 50 PhDs and secured several millions of pounds of research grants from the Research Council, European Commission, Governmental Bodies and Industry.

Professor Abdalla served on the Technology Strategy (TSB) Advisory Board and the Research Council (EPSRC) Assessment Panel and Peer Review College. He acted as an external examiner for many universities including Sheffield, Brunel, Bradford, Cranfield, Birmingham, Nottingham Trent, De Montfort, and Dublin City.

He chairs a number of Professorial Panels in the UK and overseas. He has been proactively engaged in various governmental debates at Westminster with regards to the Industrial Strategy, Artificial Intelligence, and graduates' skills for economic growth. He is also an advisor to industry in the UK, a member of the Research Council EPSRC Socio-Tech Panel, UK Teaching Excellence Panel (TEF) member, and Research Council Peer Review College.

Below: University Square Stratford - one of three UEL campuses (photo from www.simonkennedy.net)