Keynote Speaker

Professor Huda is a distinguished scholar and visionary leader in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), with over three decades of impactful contributions to teaching, research, and academic governance. Born and received primary and secondary education in Malaysia, she embarked on her higher education journey in the United States, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1988. She later completed her Master of Science in Computer System Management at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, in 1995—an experience that laid a robust foundation in computing and systems thinking.
Her academic trajectory continued with a Doctor of Philosophy in Science and System Management from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), conferred in 2006. Currently, Professor Huda serves at the School of Computing, Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM), a leading institution in ICT and digital transformation studies. She previously held pivotal leadership roles, including Dean of the School of Computing (2011–2022) and Assistant Vice Chancellor of the UUM College of Arts and Sciences (2017–2022).
Her research portfolio spans Smart Cities, Geoinformatics, Information Technology Transfer, e-Government, and Social Informatics. She has published extensively in high impact journals and conferences, contributing to both theoretical advancement and applied innovation. Her ongoing engagements in research collaboration, postgraduate supervision, and advisory capacities reflect a deep commitment to fostering digital innovation for societal benefit.
Beyond academia, Professor Huda plays an active role in national and institutional initiatives, including state and international level projects/programs aligned with the Sustainability Agenda. She was appointed as a Visiting Professor at University of Karabuk, Turkiye (2022-2023) and (2025-2026) and was invited as a keynotes speaker for international conferences in Indonesia, Sri Lanka (2023-2025).

Prof. Dr. Siti Hafizah is an expert researcher in software engineering whose work bridges software reliability, cloud computing, and intelligent software applications. Her research focuses on optimizing mobile and cloud-based systems, especially in virtual machine migration, cloud resource management, and energy-aware mobile application design. Through multi-million ringgit grants from local, international, and private organizations, she has made significant contributions to trust models, link prediction in social networks, and the integration of IoT frameworks for critical applications such as digital health and emotion-aware computing. An active member of the IEEE Society and Malaysia Software Testing Board, she has been appointed by the Department of Standards Malaysia as a Technical Committee member for the Malaysian Standard on Software and System Engineering. She is also Associate Editor for few reputable journals, and a reviewer for several Q1 ISI WoS journals. She also serves as an external assessor for academic programs at public and private universities in Malaysia. She contributes to academic development as a Program Quality Assessor Expert, Lead Auditor, Lead UM Strategic Plan (Transformative Learning), and developer of the stackable credential-based Master of Advanced Studies program.

Since 2000, Paolo Terenziani is Full Professor at the Institute of Computer Science of DISIT, University of Eastern Piedmont, Alessandria, Italy. The research activity of Paolo Terenziani has begun in 1987 and it concerns mainly the fields of Artificial Intelligence (knowledge representation, temporal reasoning, conformance analysis, process mining), Temporal Databases (query and data semantics, temporal indeterminacy, periodic data) and of Medical Informatics (clinical guidelines, decision support systems). Regarding these topics Paolo Terenziani has published about 200 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, books, conference proceedings and workshops (in particular, he achieved 15 publications on the IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering). As early as in 1998, for his research activity, he won the “Artificial Intelligence Prize” from Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has won “distinguished\best” paper awards in several international conferences, including AMIA 2012, Chicago, USA, November 2012 (more than 1000 submissions). He is currently the responsible of the Integrated Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Medical Informatics of the Alessandria Hospital and the University of Eastern Piedmont, Alessandria, Italy.

Speech Title: Personalized Training of Professional Competencies with AI: Project and Final Results
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence has the potentiality to innovate education in many areas, including medicine. Since 1996 we work on the GLARE (Guideline Acquisition, Representation and Execution) decision support system, within a long-term project for the design of advanced AI supports for the management of Computer-Interpretable Clinical Guidelines (CIGs). In the two-year project “Personalized Training of Professional Competences with AI”, we have investigated the adoption of AI and CIG systems for medical education. We have addressed different tasks related to the adoption of medical knowledge for medical education, including knowledge acquisition, representation and reasoning. Our approach supports three facilities: the navigation of CIGs, their simulated application to virtual patients, and the verification of learners, through an evaluation of the conformance between learners’ recommendations and CIG’s ones. Our approach is domain-independent, and we use the melanoma and the dyslipidemia guidelines as concrete examples. In the last six months of the project we run an experimental evaluation. We presented a course for a cohort of 50 medical students, distinguishing between a class adopting the developed AI-based tools and a control class. The learning results of the two classes have been compared.
The talk will survey the main scientific results of the project, and discuss the results of the experimental evaluation.