Shady Shehata

Shady Shehata is the Co-founder and CTO of the YOURIKA company. Out of 4000 competing companies worldwide, Shehata built a strong IP technology for personalized learning that allowed YOUIRKA to be the first and only Canadian company accepted in the Amazon Alexa Funds Competitive Program based on five due diligence interviews with Amazon AI teams. Amazon invested in YOURIKA and is a partner. Shehata built strong relationships with industry through 70-plus connections at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Before joining MBZUAI, Shehata joined Desire2Learn (D2L), where he spent 10 years leading the research and development of machine learning and data mining algorithms in production.

Shehata led the data science and business intelligence teams at D2L and built a big-data platform to make impactful change in the culture and decision-making processes, enabling descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.

Shehata led the data science and business intelligence teams at D2L and built a big-data platform to make impactful change in the culture and decision-making processes, enabling descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.

• Ph.D. in machine learning and natural language understanding from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

• Best Poster Award by Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK), 2015.
• Postdoctoral Fellowships Program by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), 2010.
• Best Paper Award Nomination by Proceedings of the Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA), Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), 2008.
• President's Graduate Scholarship by University of Waterloo, 2008.
• 1^st place Award For Best Poster at In Proceedings of the 4th Annual LORNET Scientific Conference I2LOR-07, 2007.
• 3^rd place Award For Best Demo at In Proceedings of the 4th Annual LORNET Scientific Conference I2LOR-07, 2007.
• Student Travel Award by the 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2007.
• Best Poster Presentation Award at In Proceedings of the Theme of Physical Science, Math and Technology at the Graduate Student Research Conference, 2007.
• Ontario International Education Opportunity Scholarship by University of Waterloo, 2007.
• Faculty of Engineering Scholarship by University of Waterloo, 2006.
• University of Waterloo Graduate Scholarship, 2005.
• International Doctoral Student Award by University of Waterloo, 2004.

Shehata’s research work in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence has been recognized and published in top conferences, journals, and patents including IEEE TKDE, Computational Intelligence, Springer KAIS, ACM KDD, IEEE ICDM, IEEE / WIC / ACM WI, Springer ADMA, and SDM.

• Mahmoud M. Nasr, Md. Milon Islam, Shady Shehata, Fakhri Karray, Yuri Quintana, “Smart Healthcare in the Age of AI: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Future Prospects”, IEEE Access 9: 145248-145270. 2021.
• Gábor Kismihók, Catherine Zhao, Michaéla C. Schippers, Stefan T. Mol, Scott Harrison, Shady Shehata, “Translating the Concept of Goal Setting into Practice: What ‘Else’ Does It Require Than a Goal Setting Tool?” The International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU), 388-395, 2020.
• Shady Shehata, “Early Intervention System for Student Success”, Practitioner Track Proceedings of the 6^th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK16): 39-45, 2016.
• Shady Shehata, Fakhri Karray, Mohamed Kamel, “An Efficient Concept-based Retrieval Model For Enhancing Search Engine Quality”, Knowledge and Information Systems Journal (KAIS), Springer, 2013.
• Shady Shehata, Fakhri Karray, Mohamed Kamel, “An Efficient Concept-based Mining Model for Enhancing Text Clustering”, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2010.
• Shady Shehata, Fakhri Karray, Mohamed Kamel, “An Efficient Concept-based Mining Model for Enhancing Text Clustering”, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2010.