Public Affairs

Dr. Mohammad El-Abd Placed Among Top 2% of Researchers by Stanford University

14th Jan 2021 | by the Department of PR & Marketing

Associate Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) at the American University of Kuwait (AUK), Dr. Mohammed El-Abd has been included in the top 2% of global researchers by Stanford University and Elsevier BV. The following interview discusses details of his research and his achievement: 
  
  1. What does it mean to be recognized and included in the top 2% of researchers in 2020?
    I am deeply honored and humbled for this recognition. I am very grateful to be able to conduct research that is well-recognized by my peers. I know that this is not the end of the journey and this recognition serves as a motivation for me to keep pushing forward through successful collaborations with my colleagues and students.

  2. How was your research categorized and ranked?
    The current ranking is based on a new composite measure known as the c-index. The composite index considers six citation metrics (total citations; h-index; co-authorship-adjusted Schreiber hm-index; number of citations to papers as single author; number of citations to papers as single or first author; and number of citations to papers as single, first, or last author).

  3. Is the ranking an annual recognition? Does it require multiple entries?
    This is only the second version published for this ranking. The first was in 2019. The ranking also has two recognitions for career-long and single-year impact.

  4. Can you give us more information about the field of research that was included for this ranking?
    My main field of research is metaheuristic algorithms. Metaheuristics are a class of nature-inspired algorithms that could be applied to solve engineering optimization problems.

    This is extremely important as almost all engineering problems involve the tuning of some design parameters in order to optimize certain objectives, (e.g. minimize cost, minimize power, maximize throughput… etc.). When compared to classical mathematical methods, metaheuristic algorithms have the ability to reach near-optimal solutions (best setting of these design parameters) in less time without having specific knowledge about the underlying problem structure.

  5. How was the research impactful?
    Up until recently, my research focused on improving the performance of some metaheuristic algorithms or develop cooperative frameworks in order to improve their performance. These were mainly tested on artificial benchmark libraries. However, some of my proposals including the Improved Global-best Harmony Search Algorithm and the Global-best Brain Storm Optimization Algorithms have been used by other researchers in real-world applications.

    During the past two years, I focused on expanding my research network by having more collaborations with AUK and international colleagues. One dimension was to apply these algorithms in real-world applications which included smart city optimization, identifying parameters of photovoltaic cells, feature selection, traffic signal control and job scheduling. The second dimension involved implementing these algorithms on hardware platforms (e.g. FPGAs) to be deployed for real-life scenarios.

    Furthermore, I became active in organizing research events in order to promote collaboration, exchange ideas, and identify promising future research directions. I am the founding chair of the IEEE Symposium on Cooperative Metaheuristics (SCM ), which is annually organized under the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI). I am also co-organizing a special session on scheduling problems in smart cities under the 2021 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC ).

  6. How do you think your research can benefit Kuwait and future generations?
    I look forward to continue my research on traffic signal control to be applied in Kuwait. Optimizing the signal traffic cycles can lead to reducing vehicle delays, improving the traffic network flow, and reducing energy consumption. I also hope I continue my research on smart city optimization, which started with colleagues from Japan, and apply it in Kuwait for energy optimization.

  7. How did COVID-19 affect your research?
    An important research direction that was developed during the COVID-19 era is related to engineering education. Although, I have worked in this field for around five years now publishing research about effective teaching of the Microprocessors and Interfacing course as well as capstone supervision, a new emerging research direction is related to online education. We had a successful capstone project last year that implemented a virtual laboratory for electric machines to be used by AUK students. The work  was successfully published in the flagship IEEE Conference on Engineering Education (EDUCON). I aim to extend this project into a fully-fledged system as this would provide a great learning tool for future generations for both on-site and online education.

  8. Anything you would like to add about your research and/or accomplishment?
    I love to acknowledge the support of my wife and family. Express my appreciation to all my research collaborators in and outside AUK. I must also highlight the many hardworking undergraduate students I supervised in their capstone projects, for which many good publications came to light. Many thanks for AUK and its administration over the years for their continuous support of research.

  

Dr. Mohammad El-Abd, Associate Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS)

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