1. UAS System Design 2. UAS Control systems 3. Hybrid control of UAS 4. Obstacle and collision avoidance of UAS 5. UAV onboard data storage, transmission and retrieval 6. Kalman and Particle filtering and other advanced techniques for motion sensor data fusion 7. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) 8. Single/multiple IMU-Vision-based navigation and orientation 9. Autopilots and navigation: standard and advanced solutions for navigation integrity 10. Integration of UAS into the Internet 11. IoT applications using UAS 12. Safety issues of UAS 13. Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) localization 14. Security threats of UAS 15. UAS public deployment challenges 16. UAS for cloud robotics 17. Deep neural networks (DNN) for field aerial robot perception (e.g., object detection, or semantic classification for navigation) 18. Recurrent networks for state estimation and dynamic identification of aerial vehicles 19. Deep-reinforcement learning for aerial robots (discrete-, or continuous-control) in dynamic environments 20. Learning-based aerial manipulation in cluttered environments 21. Decision making or task planning using machine learning for field aerial robots 22. Long-term ecological monitoring based on UAVs 23. Ecological Integrity parameters mapping 24. Rapid risk and disturbance assessment using drones 25. Ecosystem structure and processes assessment by using UAVs
Anis Koubaa is a Professor in Computer Science, Advisor to the Rector, and Leader of the Robotics and Internet of Things Research Lab, in Prince Sultan University. He is also R&D Consultant at Gaitech Robotics in China and Senior Researcher in CISTER/INESC TEC and ISEP-IPP, Porto, Portugal. He has been the Chair of the ACM Chapter in Saudi Arabia since 2014. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in UK. He received several distinctions and awards including the Rector Research Award in 2010 at Al-Imam Mohamed bin Saud University, and the Rector Teaching Award in 2016 at Prince Sultan University. He is the Editor in Chief of the Robotics Software Engineering topic of the International Journal of Advanced Robotics Systems, Associate Editor in the Cyber-Physical Journal (Taylor & Francis). He is also the authors of six books with Springer on robots, sensor networks and Robot Operating Systems (ROS). He has been also actively participating in program committees of several international conferences including, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems, International Conference on Robotics Computing, European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions, IEEE International Workshop on Factory Communication Systems. He is the author of more than 200 journal and conference publications, and one patent. He received several research grants as principal investigator, and he established research collaboration between Prince Sultan University and Gaitech Robotics for the development of robots and drones, and ROS.
Prof. Ahmad Azar has received the M.Sc. degree in 2006 and Ph.D degree in 2009 from Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt. He is a research associate Professor at Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Kingdom Saudi Arabia. He is also an associate professor at the Faculty of Computers and Artificial intelligence, Benha University, Egypt. Prof. Azar is the Editor in Chief of International Journal of System Dynamics Applications (IJSDA) and International Journal of Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Technology (IJSSMET) published by IGI Global, USA. Also, he is the Editor in Chief of International Journal of Intelligent Engineering Informatics (IJIEI), Inderscience Publishers, Olney, UK. Prof. Azar has worked as associate editor of IEEE Trans. Neural Networks and Learning Systems from 2013 to 2017. He is currently Associate Editor of ISA Transactios, Elsevier and IEEE systems journal. Dr. Ahmad Azar has worked in the areas of Control Theory & Applications, Process Control, Chaos Control and Synchronization, Nonlinear control, Renewable Energy, Computational Intelligence and has authored/coauthored over 200 research publications in peer-reviewed reputed journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. He is an editor of many books in the field of fuzzy logic systems, modeling techniques, control systems, computational intelligence, chaos modeling and machine learning. Dr. Ahmad Azar is closely associated with several international journals as a reviewer. He serves as international programme committee member in many international and peer-reviewed conferences. Dr. Ahmad Azar has been a senior member of IEEE since December 2013 due to his significant contributions to the profession. Dr. Ahmad Azar is the recipient of several awards including: Benha University Prize for Scientific Excellence (2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018), the paper citation award from Benha University (2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018). In June 2018, Prof. Azar was awarded the Egyptian State Prize in Engineering Sciences, the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology of Egypt, 2017. In July 2018 he was selected as a member of Energy and Electricity Research council, Academy of Scientific Research, Ministry of Higher Education. In August 2018 he was selected as senior member of International Rough Set Society (IRSS).