Joe Tekli is an Associate Professor in Computer Engineering at the Lebanese American University (LAU) and was appointed Assistant Provost for Strategic Planning and Academic Initiatives and Partnerships in September 2023.
He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Bourgogne, LE2I-CNRS (France, 2009), graduating with Highest Honors. Dr. Tekli has also completed numerous post-doctoral and research missions at prestigious institutions, including:
- University of Michigan (USA, 2018)
- University of Pau (France, 2017)
- University of Sao Paulo (Brazil, 2011)
- University of Shizuoka (Japan, 2010)
- University of Milan (Italy, 2009)
His academic excellence has been recognized through several distinguished fellowships:
- Fulbright Fellowship (USA, 2018)
- FAPESP Fellowship (Brazil, 2011)
- JSPS Fellowship (Japan, 2010)
- Cariplo Foundation Fellowship (Italy, 2009)
- French Ministry of Education Fellowship (France, 2006–2009)
- AUF Fellowship (France, 2005)
Dr. Tekli has led and participated as principal coordinator and partner in numerous international and national research projects, including STICAmSud, FAPESP, CEDRE, and CNRS-L initiatives.
Among his notable achievements, he initiated a collaboration between LAU and BMW Group (2018–present), providing over 150 distinguished engineering students with internships in Munich and fostering collaborative projects in machine learning, computer vision, and robotics applications (e.g., VIRA workshops since 2018, SORDI.ai project since 2022).
He is the lead consultant for InMind.ai and the founding director of the InMind Academy professional training program (2023–present), developed in partnership with BMW Group and IdealWorks.
Dr. Tekli’s research interests span semi-structured, semantic, and multimedia data processing, clustering, classification, computer vision, and information retrieval. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed works, including a 2024 Springer Nature book titled Synthetic Data – Revolutionizing the Industrial Metaverse.
His academic work has earned him:
- Over 625 citations (Publons) and 1616 citations (Google Scholar)
- An H-index of 15 (Publons) and 22 (Google Scholar)
- A G-index of 19 and an i10-index of 49
- A place on the Stanford/Elsevier Top 2% Scientists List (2024)
Dr. Tekli’s professional memberships and roles include:
- IEEE Senior Member (since 2009)
- ACM Member (since 2010)
- Vice Chair (2018–2022) and Secretary (2023–present) of ACM SIGAPP French Chapter
- Member of the US Atlantic Council’s AI Connect Initiative (since 2022)
- Expert Consultant for UN-ESCWA and UNICEF (2019)
- Collaborator with UNEP (2023–present)
- Associate Editor of the Springer KAIS journal (since 2022)
- Guest Editor for the Springer WWW journal (2023–2024)
- Regular Track Chair and Technical Committee Member at international conferences and workshops