Dr. Joe Tekli
Assistant Provost for Strategic Planning and Academic Initiatives & Partnerships
Dr. Joe Tekli has joined the Provost’s Office as Assistant Provost for Strategic Planning and Academic Initiatives and Partnerships in September 2023. In his capacity, he assists the Provost with duties related to strategic planning, innovation projects and partnerships, and other academic activities and initiatives.
Dr. Tekli also serves as Associate Professor in Computer Engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Univ. of Bourgogne, LE2I CNRS, France (2009), and has completed various post-docs and visiting scholar missions: Univ. of Michigan, USA (Summer 2018), ICMC, Univ. of São Paulo, Brazil (2010-2011), Univ. of Shizuoka, Japan (Spring 2010), and Univ. of Milan, Italy (Fall 2009). He was awarded prestigious fellowships: Fulbright (USA), FAPESP (Brazil), JSPS (Japan), Fondazione Cariplo (Italy), French Ministry of Education (France), and AUF (France). His research covers semi-structured, semantic, and multimedia data processing, data-mining, and information retrieval, and has more than 65 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Tekli is currently serving as Associate Editor of the Springer KAIS journal since 2022, and he regularly serves as track chair and technical committee member on international conferences and workshops.
Dr. Tekli has initiated various collaborations with academic and industry partners. He served as principal coordinator and partner in international and national research projects (e.g., STICAmSud, FAPESP, CEDRE, CNRS-L). He has initiated a collaboration between LAU and BMW Group (2018-), offering more than 120 distinguished engineering students internships at the company’s seat in Munich, and promoting lasting collaborative projects (e.g., SORDI) and continuous workshops between both institutions (VIRA 2018-23). He recently co-founded and is serving as Director of the InMind Academy (2022-), a professional training program in collaboration with international industry partners including BMW Group, Idealworks, InMind .ai, Palantir Technologies, and Nvidia.
Dr. Tekli helped coordinate various competition events at LAU and virtually (e.g., SORDI Hackathon 2022, BMW Group Beirut Hackathon 2019, First Lego League (FLL) 2019 for the first time in the MENA region, National Education Robotics Day (NERD 2018-19). He has given many oral presentations in international and local venues (e.g., UN-ESCWA, US-Atlantic Council, Beirut AI, BBC Arabic, MTV Lebanon). He has served as Interim Assistant Dean of the School of Engineering, LAU (2018-19), where he coordinated many student-centered activities and events. He is a senior member of IEEE, ACM, and is serving as Vice Chair of ACM SIGAPP French Chapter (2018-), as an Expert Consultant for UN-ESCWA and UNICEF (2019-), as a member of the US Atlantic Councils’ AI Connect initiative (2022-), and as a collaborator with UNEP (2023-).