Brief Biography
Dr. Mohamed Watfa
BSc American Univ. of Beirut, MSc Ohio, PhD Oklahoma
Dr. Mohamed K. Watfa is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Wollongong in Dubai (UOWD). Prior to this, he was an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Dr. Watfa received his Ph.D. from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma, USA. He obtained his BS in Computer Science from the American University of Beirut and his Masters degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toledo, Ohio, USA.
At 24, Dr. Watfa was one of the youngest PhD holders to graduate from his university. He was also on the Dean's Honors list and received a number of prestigious awards and scholarships. Dr. Watfa received the competitive UOWD Research Excellence Award which was a direct result from his ambitious research track record in 2009. He also received the same excellence award again in 2011 along with the Teaching Excellence Award. He has also been granted a number of national research grants including an emirates foundation research award for his work on wireless energy transfer. He was also shortlisted in the prestigious Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2011. Dr. Watfa's research work has been referenced in a number of international journals and local newspapers.
Dr. Watfa's research interests include wireless and computer networks, wireless sensor networks, Internet of Things, Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs), intelligent and ubiquitous systems, network security, and energy efficient protocols. He is the author/editor of more than three books, the guest editor of a number of international journals (e.g. Journal of Communications), the associate editor of a number of international conferences (e.g. IEEE CCNC). He also held a position as a lead network engineer at different networking companies. He is a professional member of the ACM and IEEE. He has more than 50 journal and conference publications ranked among the top in his research domain (IEEE, ACM, Wiley, and Elsevier Publishers). Dr. Watfa was recently invited as a keynote speaker in IEEE ICSCCN 2011
<click here for list of publications>.My Teaching Philosophy
I have never seen teaching as a burden. Quite the contrary, it's something I found both challenging and enormously gratifying, which is why I've sought out so many opportunities to teach over the past years. For me, one aspect of joining a university faculty that I found most interesting is the teaching opportunity. I believe teaching is not just conveying knowledge, but conveying enthusiasm. I think teaching is an opportunity to make a real difference with students, awaking their curiosity and sparking their interest. I look forward to create new classes as well as teach more traditional courses. At graduate level, my goal is to offer different courses. The courses will cover a wide range of research areas that converge in state of the art research, including Wireless networking, distributed signal processing, distributed databases, Intelligent Systems( Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic), Computer Languages (Java, C, C++), Network Security, and Software Engineering, among others. Two or three papers representative of each area will be covered and discussed. The classes will also have a hands-on project component, which ideally will be based on a real system testbeds. Since Wireless Sensor Networks has been my active research area recently, I will teach a graduate-level course that introduces students to the concept of sensor networks, and illustrates just how different these networks are from traditional distributed systems. At undergraduate level, my goal is to offer an undergraduate course on networking or intelligent systems concepts. I think that undergraduate education is crucial, partially for the information it imparts, and partially because it excites and inspires students. Some courses that I will teach over the years would be: Computer Networks, Advanced Computer Networks, Programming Languages, Wireless Networks (Selected Topics), Cryptography (Selected Topics) and many others. My own interest in computer science as a career, rather than a hobby, was sparked by a number of professors who gently and brilliantly taught my undergraduate classes. I would be in a completely unrelated field today without their impact. My goal is to teach classes as well as my professors can, and perhaps someday have a similar impact on my students. I believe that students could benefit greatly by getting early exposure to networking issues through a hands-on class on networks. The idea is to introduce the general concepts and specific topics of sensor network research, emphasizing the differences with more traditional distributed systems and networks. Beyond teaching in a classroom setting, I am looking forward to advising students individually. Again, I've been lucky enough to learn from the best. My advisor has been unfailingly positive, supportive, and attentive. I hope to follow his model and have similar success in molding the next generation of students
My Research Philosophy
Naturally, having ideas and goals are only part of conducting research. In order to have the greatest effect, ideas should address a current or future need and have the funding, manpower, and facilities to be fully explored. There is currently a lot of excitement and research activity surrounding pervasive computing and autonomic computing. DARPA and NSF have and continue to support research in pervasive computing, distributed techniques for sensor networks, logistics planning, and task/resource allocation. Because of the obvious benefit to long term scientific progress, work in large-scale self-adapting, self-healing, and self-managing systems continues to be funded by NASA, DARPA, AFRL, and NSF. My research interests have been broadly in the distributed systems and computer network areas. I have been particularly involved with Wireless Sensor Networks, a new class of distributed systems composed of distributed sensors, actuators, computation, and wireless communication. The vision of many researchers is to create sensor-rich “smart environments" through large-scale deployment of such nodes in the environment. Each node combines a miniaturized but otherwise traditional computer (e.g., capable of processing, storing, and communicating) with sensors that can detect the state of the environment. Sensors might detect temperature, sound, light, the presence of objects, people, or chemicals. There are a wide range of applications envisioned for such sensor networks, including microclimate studies, groundwater contaminant monitoring, precision agriculture, condition-based maintenance of machinery in complex environments, urban disaster prevention and response, and military interests. Sensor networks are, in many ways, a new class of distributed systems. Though existing systems such as the Internet have successfully tackled many scaling problems, sensor networks break several key assumptions that hold true in the Internet. The new assumptions have led to a flurry of new systems research, in which I have taken part. The potential for this research area has been demonstrated by the increased number of industrial, university and research institutions working on this area, and by several commercial and scientific applications that have been deployed. My primary research focus lie in the broad areas of wireless networking including performance analysis, algorithms, protocols and optimization of wireless sensor networks. I have been working on how to understand these sensor networks and how to make them more energy efficient through theoretical analysis and experimental studies. During the course of my research, i had the opportunity to collaborate with many excellent researchers and mentors which was a very valuable experience for me.
