Joe Tekli

Academic and Professional Roles

Dr. Joe Tekli is an accomplished AI researcher, Assistant Provost and Associate Professor at the Lebanese American University (LAU), and Director of inmind.academy, where he leads efforts to train the next generation of AI talent.

Education and Global Research

He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bourgogne and has completed international research missions at leading institutions such as the University of Michigan, São Paulo, Shizuoka, and Milan.

Expertise and Achievements

Dr. Tekli specializes in AI, data mining, and information retrieval. He has authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications and led numerous international research projects. His impact in the field earned him a place on the 2024 Stanford/Elsevier Top 2% Scientists List.

Leadership and Advisory Roles

He serves as Vice Chair of ACM SIGAPP France, a consultant for UN-ESCWA and UNICEF since 2019, and a member of the U.S. Atlantic Council’s AI Connect initiative since 2022, advancing AI innovation across academia, industry, and policy.

Presentation

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it works? This talk provides a brief overview to concepts such as general and narrow artificial intelligence, as well to practical uses of AI in the present and near future. The presenter will explain AI techniques allowing to recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, and surprise – called Affective computing. Textual and multimodal emotion analysis has been gaining increased attention, with various applications ranging over opinion mining, blog analysis, and client feedback on the Web and social media, improving human-computer interaction and decision making, as well as therapeutic and social emotion analysis to help autistic children express their emotions. This talk will provide a practical introduction for participants with little or no computing background.