Professor Abdulmotaleb El Saddik is an internationally renowned expert in artificial intelligence, digital twins, immersive multimedia systems, and the metaverse. He currently serves as a Distinguished University Professor and University Research Chair Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and concurrently as the Acting Chair of the Computer Vision Department at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in the UAE. Professor El Saddik founded and has been the director of the Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory (MCRLab) at the University of Ottawa since 2002, and was designated a Distinguished Professor in 2014. His research has consistently focused on integrating AI with emerging technologies to advance intelligent and immersive human-computer interaction, covering cutting-edge areas such as AI and digital twins, computer vision and virtual/augmented reality, and multimodal interaction in metaverse environments, positioning him as a global academic leader in these fields. For his outstanding contributions to interactive haptic audio-visual systems, he was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2009. He was subsequently elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 2010, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2020, and a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada in 2010. In the same year, he was also named an ACM Distinguished Scientist.

Professor El Saddik's academic output is remarkably prolific, with over 600 peer-reviewed papers and 10 academic books to his credit. According to Google Scholar, his research has garnered over 27,000 citations, with an h-index of 84, demonstrating a broad and profound impact across multimedia, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction research domains. In his commitment to academic service, he holds pivotal editorial roles for several authoritative international journals, including Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Multimedia (ACM TOMM), and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (IEEE TMM) and Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP). He has also been instrumental in organizing international academic conferences, having served as General Chair or Technical Program Chair for over 50 international conferences, including ACM Multimedia 2008. These efforts have significantly fostered global collaboration and exchange in multimedia and intelligent interaction technologies. As a scholar with exceptional contributions at the intersection of AI and multimedia, Professor El Saddik continuously drives technological innovation and academic advancement, enjoying a stellar reputation within the international academic community as an unparalleled leader in his field.