Profiles

Ali is a Senior Research Staff Scientist within the CybeResil group, and is currently mentoring the group's research under the direction of Prof. Paulo Esteves-Verissimo. Ali was part of the core research team at the foundation of the former KAUST's RC3 Center and recently the Cyber Security and Resilience Community (CriSys), whose mission is to improve the state of the art and practice of Cyber-secure Cyber-resilient Cyber-physical systems. Ali is also project lead of building and operating the Cyber Security and Resilience (CSR) lab at KAUST. 

Ali has a hybrid academic and industrial research leadership experience. He was a co-founder and the head of Cybersecurity and Smart Distributed Systems research and innovation team at the industrial VORTEX CoLAB (Capgemini Group). He was in charge of the entire R&I process: strategy, scouting, ideation, conception, design, implementation, proof, validation, evaluation, publication, patenting, and pitching, and interviewing.

Prior to that, Ali worked as Assistant Researcher at INESC TEC (HASLab research unit), Portugal, where he founded with his co-authors the mainstream models for CRDTs (a.k.a., Conflict-free Replicated  Datatypes). The work has seen significant adoption in the Geo-replicated scalable available systems (among them, Facebook Apollo, PayPal, SoundCloud, TomTom, Cassandra DB, Microsoft Azure CosmosDB). In 2012-2013, he worked as Postdoc at INSA de Lyon (France), focusing on scalable anonymous communications under malicious and rational attacks, following a Game Theory Nash Equilibrium model. In 2012, he obtained his PhD degree with European Label in Computer Science from the University of Toulouse, France, working on Adaptive Byzantine/malicious/intrusion tolerant protocols. During his PhD, he visited EPFL (Switzerland) twice, hosted by Rachid Guerraoui who co-mentored his PhD. Ali was also an Invited Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics of University of Minho and at MAP-I PhD school (Portugal). He founded, coordinated, and taught a new PhD course on "Successful Systems in Production", taught Cyber Security courses co-organized by KAUST Academy and the Saudi Nation Cybersecurity Authority (NCA), and also taught Master-level courses on Security, Blockchain, and available Geo-replicated systems topics.

Ali is and has been advising 3 PhD students and several Masters students on topics related to resilient Byzantine/intrusion tolerant available systems and cyber-secure automotive systems. Ali is currently mentoring several Research Scientists. Postdocs, interns, and students within the CybeResil group.

Foremost, Ali has a strong belief in research and innovation that serve humanity as a priority.

In a nutshell, Ali's main interest lies in both research and practice that revolve around understanding and building Cyber Secure and Resilient, scalable, available, efficient, green, smart, and distributed systems.

More recently, his focus has been on the Cybersecure Cyber-resilient Automotive industry (i.e., Autonomous Vehicles, Connected Vehicles, V2X), Cyber-physical systems (i.e., smart and connected infrastructures), small Satellite constellations, Hardware FPGA security and resilience, and Blockchain/Distributed Ledgers. Given the diversity and multidisciplinary nature of these areas, Ali is interested in any research topics that intersect and make the aforementioned topics better (in all senses). 

Throughout his research career, Ali's work spanned diverse topics on Byzantine/malicious Fault/intrusion tolerance,  Blockchains, Resilience, Cybersecurity, Security, Anonymous Communication, Cloud/Fog/Edge Computing, Automotive, and data management (Conflict-free Replicated DataTypes - CRDTs). 

Sheikh received his PhD in Computer Engineering from King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM), Dhahran, KSA in 2016. Before coming to KAUST, he was serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Air University, Islamabad, Pakistan.

His research interests lie in designing fault tolerant digital circuits, hardware security and computer architecture. At RC3 he will extend his knowledge in investigating and designing of secure and resilient hardware platforms.

Inês is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Cyber Resilience Research Group - CybeResil - part of the CriSys Community.

Before coming to KAUST, she worked as a Research Scientist at Intel Labs (Germany), where she explored safety features in the realms of open-source hardware and chiplets. In 2022, she obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Luxembourg where, being part of the CritiX group of the Interdisciplinary Center for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT), she researched architectural support for hypervisor-level intrusion tolerance in multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). In the same year, she briefly worked as a Research Associate in the same group, looking into NoC security and FPGA-based matrix accelerators.

Her Bachelor's and Master's studies were completed at the University of Lisbon, where she also worked as a Junior Researcher in the LaSIGE research unit (Navigators group).

Her research interests include fault- and intrusion-tolerant resilient systems, computer architecture, hardware design, FPGA security, FPGA partial reconfiguration, hardware description languages (HDLs) and Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs).

Bachelor's degree from Wuhan University.

Edge computing, federated learning, machine learning systems, and resilient computing.