Short Bio
Ahmed Khaled joined the Department of Computer Science at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) in August 2018, Chicago, USA. He is also a Visiting Associate Professor in the Masters Program in Computer Science (MPCS) at The University of Chicago (UChicago) since March 2024. His research interests are in designing and developing systems, tools, and applications for distributed systems with the Internet of Things (IoT) as a particular use case of focus. His current focus and research interest is on three main fields: 1) Smart healthcare systems and e-Health applications; 2) Location-aware services for smart spaces; and 3) Utilizing Data management, modeling, and mining techniques for descriptive and predictive analytics. The projects involve software and hardware platforms from different vendors and with different operating environments.
In summer 2018, Dr. Khaled earned his Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida. His doctoral research under the supervision of Prof. Sumi Helal in the Mobile and Pervasive Computing lab has focused on architectural and algorithmic design for elements of the Internet of Things (IoT) along with an experimental-driven approach to system implementation and validation. Specifically, he has designed an architecture for the IoT and an associated programming model with the goal of transforming everyday objects and devices such as consumer electronics and appliances into smarter, social and interactive entities capable of participating in the development of opportune IoT applications autonomously.
In fall 2013, Dr. Khaled earned his M.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Cairo University, Egypt. He worked under the supervision of Prof. Rabie Ramadan on developing security scheme for the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The scheme merges the lightweight Elliptic Curve public key cryptography with symmetric pair-wise keys for dynamic security key distribution and management. The second part of the research was about developing a fuzzy-based clustering technique for both single and multi-modal sensor networks for efficient energy saving and data aggregation.
IoT & Systems Lab
My current research interests are in the fields of distributed systems and the promising emerging technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) especially in the fields of smart home, smart tourism, and healthcare systems and personal healthcare. In the past two decades, there have been numerous technological advances in these fields. However, there are many challenging problems that still limit the realism and effectiveness of smart spaces and restrict the development of a wide range of interesting features and applications. Turning the spaces around us into smart spaces is not just a matter of connecting a huge number of devices to communicate, but also enabling different interactions between such devices and users for a wide range of services and applications. These issues pose several new research challenges, which often require fundamental rethinking of the way we define and design solutions for smart spaces. My research interests are driven by a strong desire to bridge the interdisciplinary topics and exploit the interesting features and technologies for the true enablement of smart environments. My main research goal is to design systems, develop algorithms and build up applications towards the visionary Internet of Things on the different scales and scenarios of smart spaces.
Current Active Projects:
The Atlas framework to prepare smart spaces and to build IoT applications is composed of the following main components:
1) IoT Device Description Language (IoT-DDL): XML-based human- and machine-readable configuration scheme to describe a thing in IoT in terms of inner components, identity, capabilities, resources, attachments and services. The IoT-DDL also describes the knowledge (social bonds and relationships) injected or acquired by the thing, as well as the different interactions that engage the thing with cloud platforms, edges, users (e.g., end-user, developer) and space-mates (nearby things or remote ones).
2) Atlas Thing Architecture: Based on the specifications of the IoT-DDL, Atlas thing architecture enables the automatic integration of the devices into the ecosystem and allows the programmer to discover and combine available services to create applications for the smart space. The Atlas thing architecture is a set of lightweight operating layers that initially aim at turning a thing into a smart stand-alone and self-dependable unit, getting smarter, more social, and more interactive with time. Besides capturing new engagement and programming opportunities, such knowledge exchange increases a thing’s awareness of the surrounding ecosystem and enables discovering and building new social relationships. Along with the provisioning and management capabilities offered by the Atlas Thing Architecture to the space users and developers, the Atlas Thing Architecture supports both thing-to-thing and thing-to-cloud communication paradigms through the support of a set of communication protocols.
3) Inter-Thing Relationship Framework: The inter-thing relationships programming framework utilizes Atlas Thing Architecture as well as the thing IoT-DDL specifications to build a distributed programming ecosystem for the social IoT. The framework broadens the social IoT thing-level relationships (that link the things according to their identification attributes) and utilizes a set of concrete service-level relationships (that logically and functionally tie the offered services to build scenarios and applications). We believe this can empower developers to program a much wider class of meaningful IoT applications. The framework introduces service (abstraction of the function offered by a thing), relationship (abstraction of how different services are linked together) and recipe (abstraction of how different services and relationships build up a segment of an app) as the primitives for the Atlas IoT application. The framework also defines a set of operators that functionally define how the primitives are wired.
Check the attached resources below to access the full list of publications and to download Atlas Framework
One of the critical and core IoT fields is the medical and healthcare field - which is typically referred to as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The field of IoMT covers several aspects that include: 1) medical devices that collect data using body sensors and wearable devices to more complex and specialized surgical tools; 2) communication networks and secure channels between patients and medical staff; 3) distributed information systems to build electronic patient health records along with facilitating the storage, accessibility, and management of these records; and 4) healthcare-oriented applications and interactive dashboards for users. In traditional healthcare systems, most of the critical operations are carried out manually, introducing additional effort and obstacles to the medical facilities and staff. The goal of this project is to design and build a 2-tier lightweight framework to tackle the above mentioned challenges for effective digital e-Healthcare and data-driven healthcare services and applications. The two tiers are 1) the Edge middleware that resides in an edge device (Patient’s Smartphone) and 2) the On-Cloud middleware that resides on a public or private remote platform or server. Read more about this project from the following publications:
Selected Publications:
Ahmed E. Khaled, Mohammed Bangash. "Layered Data Pipeline for Context-aware Electronic Health records and Healthcare Services", accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on E-health Networking, Application & Services (Healthcom 24), Nara, Japan, 2024. [Reference]
Mohammed Bangash, "Smartphone as an Edge for Context-aware real-time processing for personal E-Health", Honors Thesis, NEIU, December 2022. [Link]
Ahmed E. Khaled, "Internet of Medical Things (IoMT): Overview, Taxonomies, and Classifications" Journal of Computer and Communications 10, no. 8 (2022): 64-89. [Reference]
Ahmed E. Khaled and Rousol Al Goboori, “Iot hub as a service (haas): Data-oriented environment for interactive smart spaces” In the 6th Workshop on Very Large Internet of Things (VLIoT 2022) in conjunction with the VLDB 2022 conference in Sydney, Australia, and appeared in Open Journal of Internet Of Things (OJIOT) 8, no. 1 (2022): 66-79. [Reference]
E-IoT is an environment that emulates smart spaces by virtualizing the operation of IoT things. Over virtualization concepts and technologies, E-IoT provides real operating and working environments by utilizing a range of IoT-designed operating systems and IoT communication protocols and libraries to emulate IoT things' software capabilities. E-IoT also simulates the IoT devices’ hardware capabilities and properties to run hardware-dependent instructions and interactions. E-IoT enables developers to develop, deploy, and test a wide range of IoT interactions and applications before the deployment on real things. E-IoT allows thing-oriented applications that work within the domain of specific things and smart space-oriented applications that work within the domain of connected things through Edge devices.
Selected Publications:
Ahmed Khaled, Mohammed Ashfaq, Sebin Suresh "E-IoT: Emulator to Develop and Test IoT Applications" the 8th IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT 2022), Yokohama, Japan, October 2022. [Reference]
With the rising popularity of mobile personal devices (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches), Location-based Services (LBS) have been integrated into a wide range of businesses, applications, and venues. LBS -also known as geolocation services- refers to services designed to deliver passive information, interactive content, or executable functionalities to users in real-time or offline [15]. Such services are triggered with respect to the user’s proximity from a certain point of interest or the user’s exact or approximate geographical location in pre-defined areas (e.g., retail store, library, garden, art exhibit, tourist destination).
Selected Publications:
Ahmed E. Khaled. ”Smart Location-based Services (Smart-LBS): Platform for Smart Space-Independent LBS.” the 24th Annual IEEE International Conference on Electro Information Technology (eit2024), Wisconsin, USA, 2024. [Reference]
Dharmik Parthiv Chhatbar, "IoT Technologies to enable Location-based Services (LBS) for Smart Tourism", Honors Thesis, NEIU, August 2024. [Link]
Conferences, Workshops, and Demos
Ahmed E. Khaled, Mohammed Bangash. "Layered Data Pipeline for Context-aware Electronic Health records and Healthcare Services", accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on E-health Networking, Application & Services (Healthcom 24), Nara, Japan, 2024. [Reference]
Ahmed E. Khaled. ”Smart Location-based Services (Smart-LBS): Platform for Smart Space-Independent LBS.” the 24th Annual IEEE International Conference on Electro Information Technology (eit2024), Wisconsin, USA, 2024. [Reference]
Wyatt Lindquist, Abdelsalam Helal, and Ahmed E. Khaled. "Health-IoT: Requirements for a Healthy Ecosystem." In 2022 7th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies (SpliTech), pp. 1-6. IEEE, 2022.[Reference]
Ahmed Khaled, Mohammed Ashfaq, Sebin Suresh "E-IoT: Emulator to Develop and Test IoT Applications" the 8th IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT 2022), Yokohama, Japan, October 2022. [Reference]
Ahmed E. Khaled and Rousol Al Goboori, “Iot hub as a service (haas): Data-oriented environment for interactive smart spaces” In the 6th Workshop on Very Large Internet of Things (VLIoT 2022) in conjunction with the VLDB 2022 conference in Sydney, Australia, and appeared in Open Journal of Internet Of Things (OJIOT) 8, no. 1 (2022): 66-79.[Reference]
Wyatt Lindquist, Ahmed Khaled, Sumi Helal, “IoT-DDL: Device Description Language for a Programmable IoT” SpliTech2020 – 5th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies, Croatia, September, 2020.[Reference]
Sumi Helal, Ahmed Khaled, Wyatt Lindquist, “The Importance of Being Thing: Or the Trivial Role of Powering Serious IoT Scenarios” In the Proceedings of the 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), July 2019, Dallas, Texas, USA. [Reference]
Yi Xu, Sumi Helal, Choonhwa Lee, Ahmed Khaled, “Energy Savings in Very Large Cloud-IoT Systems” International Workshop on Very Large Internet of Things (VLIoT 2019) in conjunction with the 2019 VLDB Conference in Los Angeles, USA.[Reference]
Ahmed E. Khaled, Wyatt Lindquist, Sumi Helal, “Demo Abstract: DIY Health IoT Apps”, Demo in the 16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2018), November 2018, Shenzhen, China. [Reference]
Sumi Helal, Ahmed E. Khaled, Venkata Gutta, “Atlas Thing Architecture: Enabling Mobile Apps as Things in the IoT”, Demo in Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (pp. 480-482), MobiCom '17, October 2017, Snowbird, Utah, USA. [Reference]
Ahmed E. Khaled, Sumi Helal, “A Framework for Inter-Thing Relationships for Programming the Social IoT”, IEEE 4th World Forum on Internet of Things, February 2018, Singapore. [Reference]
Sumi Helal, Ahmed E. Khaled, Venkata Gutta, “Atlas Thing Architecture – Enabling Mobile Apps as Things in the IoT”, Demo in the 23rd ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom17), October 2017, Snowbird, Utah, USA.[Reference]
Ahmed E. El-Din, Rabie A. Ramadan, Magda B. Fayek, “VEGK: Virtual ECC Group Key for Wireless Sensor Networks”, The 2nd international conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC’13) at technical symposia Communications and Information Security (CIS), San Diego, USA, 2013. [Reference]
Ahmed El-Din, Rabie A. Ramadan, and Magda B. Fayek, “Secure clustering based SEP using Virtual ECC Group Key for Wireless Sensor Networks”, In 2012 International Conference on Engineering and Technology (ICET), pp. 1-6. IEEE, 2012. [Reference]
Ahmed El-Din, Rabie A. Ramadan, Amira A. Elmagid, and Salah A. Aly “Novel scheme of fuzzy based concealing sink node with fake holes (F-CSH)." International Workshop on Wireless Networks and Energy Saving Techniques (WNTEST-2014) in conjunction with The 5th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies. [Reference]
Ahmed E. El-Din, Rabie A. Ramadan, Magda B. Fayek, “A Novel Fuzzy HEED Security using VEGK for Wireless Sensor Networks”, The 8th IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Sensor Networks Security (WSNS'12), in conjunction with MASS, LV, USA, 2012. [Reference]
Journal Articles
Wyatt Lindquist, Sumi Helal, Ahmed Khaled, and Wesley Hutchinson. "IoTility: Architectural Requirements for Enabling Health IoT Ecosystems." IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (2019).[Reference]
Ahmed E. Khaled, "Internet of Medical Things (IoMT): Overview, Taxonomies, and Classifications" Journal of Computer and Communications 10, no. 8 (2022): 64-89.[Reference]
Lindquist, W., Helal, S., Khaled, A., Kotonya, G., Lee, J., “MAAT: Mobile Apps As Things in the IoT” , In: Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT). 3, no. 4, 1-22 p, 2019. [Reference]
Ahmed E. Khaled, Wyatt Lindquist, Sumi Helal, “Service-Relationship Programming Framework for the Social IoT” Open Journal of Internet Of Things (OJIOT), 4(1), PP 35-53, 2018, and presented in the International Workshop on Very Large Internet of Things (VLIoT 2018) in conjunction with the VLDB 2018 Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.[Reference]
Ahmed E. Khaled, Sumi Helal, “Interoperable Communication Framework for Bridging RESTful and Topic-based Communication in IoT” , The Future Generation Computer Systems Journal, Special Issue on “Internet of things: Communications, collaborations and services in networks of embedded devices”, ElSEVIER, 2018. [Reference]
Ahmed E. Khaled, Sumi Helal, Wyatt Lindquist, Choonhwa Lee, “IoT-DDL – Device Description Language for the “T” in IoT”, IEEE Access, Vol 6, Issue 1, PP (24048-24063), December 2018.[Reference]
Yi Xu, Sumi Helal, Choonhwa Lee, and Ahmed Khaled “Energy savings in very large cloud-iot systems”, Open Journal of Internet Of Things (OJIOT), Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019 [Reference]
Ahmed E. El-Din, Rabie A. Ramadan, Magda B. Fayek, “Fuzzy Based Clustering and Data Aggregation for Multi-modal WSN (C-DAMM)” , The international journal of Robotics and Automation, Special Issue on Computational Intelligence and Sensor Networks for Automation Applications, Acta Press, Vol. 29, 2014. [Reference]
Ahmed E. El-Din, Rabie A. Ramadan, Amira A. Elmagid and Salah Aly, “Novel Scheme of Fuzzy Based Concealing Sink Node with Fake Holes (F-CSH)” , Procedia Computer Science Journal, Elsevier, Vol. 32 (2014) 1174 – 1179.[Reference]
Ahmed E. El-Din, Rabie A. Ramadan, “Smart Secure HEED for Wireless Sensor Networks” , the International journal of Sensor Networks (IJSNet), Vol. 14, No. 4, 2013 (Impact Factor 1.38).[Reference]
Ahmed E. El-Din, Rabie A. Ramadan, Magda B. Fayek, “VEGK: Secure Clustering for Efficient Operation in WSNs” , the international journal of Communications and Computer Security, Acta Press, Vol.3, 2013.[Reference]
Ahmed E. El-Din, Rabie A. Ramadan, “Efficient Mixed Mode Summary for Mobile Networks” International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Networks (IJWMN), Vol. 5, No. 4, August 2013.[Reference]
Students
IoT LBS, Tools, and Systems related projects
IoMT and Healthcare related projects
Cloud and Microservices Architecture related projects
Courses
Academia provides a unique opportunity to combine both research and teaching in a way not possible in any other setting. In the process of teaching –or in different wording “sharing knowledge”– there is almost nothing more rewarding than delivering new concepts to students and getting them engaged with the topic passionately. Through the teaching process, we gain a deeper perspective of the subjects we teach and a better view on how the various concepts are linked into a “bigger picture”. Teaching is an important activity through which researchers may engage students in different research challenges for more advances in the field and ultimately feed some aspects of that research back into the classroom. Since the semester of Fall 2016, I taught several classes with a main focus on systems and IoT-related classes.
Courses taught at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU)
- CS349 Intro to the Internet of Things (IoT)
- CS341 Parallel Computing & Distributed Systems
- CS415 Design Of Database Systems
- CS308 Operating Systems
- CS331 Computer Networks
- CS315 Modern Database Management
- CS342 Introduction to Human Computer Interaction
Courses taught at University of Chicago (UChicago)
- MPCS 53001 Databases, The University of Chicago (MPCS program) - Spring and Autumn 2024
Courses taught at University of Florida (UF)
- COP3275 Computer Programming using C - Summer17/Summer18
- COP2800 Computer Programming using Java - Fall16
- COP3503 Programming Fundamentals II - Spring18
Contact Info
aezz.khaled {at} gmail {dot} com
aekhaled {at} neiu {dot} edu
5500 North St. Louis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625-4699
Office LWH 3059 - Department of Computer Science, NEIU