Hamid Mukhtar

Editorial bio

Hamid Mukhtar is a computer scientist, not a futurist – which is why his view on AI in education is more useful than most. Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham Dubai's School of Computer Science, he came to the campus with a PhD from France's National Institute for Telecommunications and a career running through NUST Pakistan, Taif University in Saudi Arabia and Telecom SudParis. He now teaches across MSc Computer Science, MSc Data Science, MSc AI and Machine Learning, and the BSc Computer Science and AI programme that Birmingham Dubai has made its calling card.

His research sits where NLP, deep learning and health informatics meet – a long list of peer-reviewed papers on everything from EEG-based alcoholism detection to IoT frameworks for COVID screening, from diabetes prediction with electronic medical records to persuasive design in mobile apps. He also writes, publicly and specifically, on what universities should do differently in the age of AI – a recent Medium piece asks whether CS and AI are still the right majors, and answers in the voice of someone who has to actually tell students what to pick.

Worth following if you want a working computer scientist's answer to the AI-and-higher-ed question, delivered without the hype or the panic.

By thehype editorial