Dr Faiyaz Doctor acts as the Innovation Director, looking at collaborations, such as the Royal Academy of Engineering higher‐education‐partnership‐sub-Saharan African funded innovation & entrepreneurship network led by the University of E’Swatini.

Faiyaz graduated with an honour’s degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Birmingham and obtained an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and Agents and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex. Over the course of his career, he has worked in both industry and academia where his work has involved developing and applying nature-inspired computational intelligence approaches for human-centred systems related to various real-world problems such as smart environments, elderly care, energy optimization, industrial automation, information analysis, decision-making and simulation and affective computing. He is particularly interested in the design and application of fuzzy logic systems for modelling and handling data uncertainties to provide interpretable reasoning solutions and their combination with other computational intelligence-based machine learning and optimization techniques for hybrid systems and intelligent agents.

Faiyaz has published over 75 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, conferences, and workshops and is a member of the IEEE and their Computational Intelligence Society’s Emergent Technologies Technical Committee. He is employed currently as a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) with the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, head of the Intelligent Connected Societies Group and a member of the Centre for Computational Intelligence & Intelligent Embedded Systems and the Environments Group at the University of Essex (UK). Faiyaz has led and co-led several projected funded through ‘Innovate UK’, Harvard University, and the Newton Fund. He is currently co-leading a project funded by the Royal Academy of Engineers, Anglo American Group Foundation and the Global Challenges Research Fund on capacity building in sub-Saharan Africa using creative science technologies.