Biography

Dr. Shehata earned his Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo in machine learning and natural language understanding a decade ago where he developed awarding winning research and authored patents. His research work in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence has been recognized and published in top conferences and journals. Dr. Shehata has over 20 years of experience in operational AI. He joined Desire2Learn where he spent years leading the research and development of machine learning and data mining algorithms in production to build AI based products. He spent years developing and scaling robust software platform and introduced new methodologies and systems to enable advanced predictive modelling against petabyte-scale data in AI-based products. He led the data science and business intelligence teams at D2L to adopt data-driven platform and culture to make a impactful change in decision-making processes in order to enable descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. Dr. Shehata Led the engineering charge on Big data analytics architecture and evangelizes his research and development through journals, conference presentations, demos and patents where he provided thought leadership. Dr. Shehata is a highly sought-after speaker and contributor at research community of AI, learning analytics events, conferences and journals. Dr. Shehata was the Practitioner Program Chair of the International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge in 2017. Dr. Shehata was nominated for the SOLAR executive committee in 2018. Currently, Dr. Shehata is the Co-founder and CTO of YourIKA company where he leads the engineering, research, and development efforts of artificial intelligence platform to build intelligent systems that can teach educational content using conversational AI.