Ziad Kobti
Director
School of Computer Science
University of Windsor

Dr. Ziad Kobti is a tenured professor at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario. He received his PhD in 2004 from Wayne State University. He is currently the Director of the School of Computer Science at UWindsor, serving a second consecutive term in this role since July 2012. He has served as the University of Windsor representative on the Scientific Advisory Committee for SOSCIP since its inauguration in 2015 and the Windsor site representative for SHARCNET/ComputeCanada, now Digital Research Alliance of Canada, since 2014.
He was elected to the executive board of the Canadian Association of Artificial Intelligence (CAIAC) in 2013, serving as Executive Secretary (2013-1015), Vice-President (2015-2017), President (2017-2019) and Past-President (2019-2021). He is a past organizer of the Canadian AI Conference and past program co-chair and local organizer, the oldest national AI conference in Canada.
He is the recipient of Windsor’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Contributions to University Teaching (2016). He served as Senator at the University of Windsor for several years and chaired the Student Caucus that helps relay the voice of student’s life on campus to Senate. He is an avid recruiter and student advocate awarded the Faculty Award by the Organization of Part-time University Students (OPUS, 2017). Received funds from Google and other industry for promoting and supporting Computer Science to high school students and teachers in the Southwestern Ontario, as well as coached and hosted the East Central North American Regional competition for the International Collegiate Programming Competition, at Windsor for several years. He is instrumental in bringing the FIRST robotics competition to the Windsor Region and hosts multiple training sessions for high school students, including special events in collaboration with local schoolboars for young women in Computer Science.
Dr. Kobti is also an active researcher in Artificial Intelligence working on evolutionary search heuristics, social simulations, and decision support systems. His research program is well funded including most recently NSERC (Discovery, RTI, Alliance) and CFI (2022). He also has several research contracts with industry and government including Ford Motors and Immigration Refugee Citizenship Canada focusing on building robust AI applications. He published over 100 refereed publications. He was an invited speaker at multiple events and conferences, TedX, including the the Alex Trebek forum for dialogue: Canada 150 Conference on Innovation and Globalization (2017), and the Canadian Auto Innovation summit in Detroit, MI (2018).