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Dr. Nedal Ababneh is an Associate Professor at the University of Khorfakkan (UKF), Sharjah, UAE, where his academic work focuses on the intersection of security, intelligent systems, and distributed computing. He previously served as Acting Director of Abu Dhabi Polytechnic (ADPoly) and as Head of the Information Security Engineering Technology Department, positions in which he led large-scale academic development and accreditation initiatives and established multiple degree and training programs in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and information technology aligned with national skills frameworks and industry certification pathways. At ADPoly, he founded the Cyber Valley, a strategic innovation and training hub that integrates hands-on academies and deep partnerships with leading global technology organizations—including Cisco, Huawei, Palo Alto Networks, Immersive Labs, CyberGate, Microsoft, Oracle, CompTIA, and EC‑Council—to advance workforce readiness, cyber-range learning, and experiential education across government and industry ecosystems. He has secured, led, and managed major research, training, and capacity‑building projects with cumulative values ranging from tens to hundreds of millions of dirhams, overseeing end‑to‑end lifecycles from scoping and stakeholder alignment to delivery and impact tracking. Dr. Ababneh received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of Sydney in 2009 and his Master’s degree from The University of New South Wales in 2004, and he has since built a cross‑continental research portfolio through roles as Senior Lecturer and IT Program Chair, Visiting Research Scientist at CSIRO (Australia), Assistant Professor at the University of Bahrain, Senior Research Fellow at WiSAR Lab (Ireland), and Research Fellow at Telecom ParisTech (France). His research traverses information security, Internet of Things (IoT) architectures, wireless sensor networks, federated learning, and nature‑inspired optimization, with an emphasis on communication‑efficient and privacy‑aware learning at the edge. Recent work includes advancing federated learning via modified variants of the Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO)—M‑ALO1 and M‑ALO2—to reduce communication overhead while improving accuracy and robustness under non‑IID data and unstable networks; evaluations across datasets such as CIFAR‑10 and MNIST demonstrate competitive gains in both convergence and communication efficiency, highlighting practical benefits for sensor‑rich systems and edge intelligence. In addition to research, he has supervised senior design projects and graduate theses, mentored faculty and instructors on modern pedagogical and assessment methods, and collaborated with public‑ and private‑sector partners to co‑design micro‑credentials, academies, and cyber‑skills bootcamps that map directly to in‑demand roles. He regularly contributes to curriculum modernization in security and AI (from secure systems and network defense to applied machine learning for embedded and distributed platforms), and he engages with the scholarly community through peer review, technical program participation, and knowledge‑transfer activities that bridge academia and industry. At UKF, his current agenda unites secure sensing, distributed optimization, and edge/IoT AI to enable resilient, scalable, and resource‑aware learning across heterogeneous devices, with applications ranging from cyber‑physical systems to environmental sensing and smart-city infrastructure. A long‑standing member of the professional community, Dr. Ababneh is affiliated with IEEE, the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc), ACM, and the Australian Computer Society (ACS); he is committed to building inclusive talent pipelines, strengthening regional R&D capacity, and translating research outcomes into secure, real‑world deployments that advance digital transformation across the UAE and beyond