Prof. Youssef Iraqi

Associate Professor · College of Computing · UM6P · Benguerir, Morocco

Recent News

Apr 2026 Paper accepted at IDA 2026: "E-PAGEC: A Differentiable Joint Attributed-Graph Embedding and Clustering Model."
Apr 2026 New paper in Expert Systems with Applications: "Trust in Recommender Systems: A Survey."
Mar 2026 New paper in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing: "CAT-Net: A Channel and Self-Attention TCN for Robust Frame-Level Overlapping Speech Detection."
Feb 2026 Paper accepted at EuroS&P 2026: "Federated Matrix Factorization under Local Differential Privacy via Directional Noise."
Oct 2025 Keynote at the 8th International Conference on Applied Informatics, Benguerir, Morocco: "Trustworthy and Intelligent IoT Systems: Challenges and Emerging Directions."
Sep 2025 2nd place in the SICS-155 Challenge at MICCAI 2025.

About

Youssef Iraqi received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Montreal, Canada, in 2000 and 2003, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor at the College of Computing, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (UM6P), Morocco, where he leads the MANARA Lab (Multimodal AI, Networks, Analytics, Recommender Systems & Augmented Sensing Laboratory).

Before joining UM6P, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Khalifa University, United Arab Emirates, for 12 years. Before that, he was Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Dhofar University, Oman, for four years. From 2004 to 2005, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada.

He has published more than 160 research papers in international journals and refereed conference proceedings, and holds 5 US patents. His research spans trustworthy and explainable AI, wireless networks and 6G, security and privacy, speech and affective computing, and healthcare AI. In 2008, he received the IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize Paper Award in the field of Communications Systems.

  • IEEE Senior Member
  • ACM Member
  • Associate Editor, Computer Communications, Elsevier
  • Technical Editor, IEEE Network
  • Editor, Vehicular Communications, Elsevier
  • Associate Editor, Annals of Telecommunications, Springer

PhD Students

  1. Abderrafi Abdeddine — Task Allocation in Crowdsensing Environments (co-supervised with Dr. Loubna Mekouar)
  2. Yassin Terraf — AI-Based Robust Speaker Identification under Challenging Acoustic Environments
  3. Imane Akdim — Trust-based Recommender Systems (co-supervised with Dr. Loubna Mekouar)
  4. Abdelghafour Aboukacem — Student Dropout Detection and Prediction (co-supervised with Dr. Loubna Mekouar, Dr. Ismail Berrada, and Dr. Elhoucine Bergou)
  5. Yasser El-Jarida — Multimodal and Explainable AI for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction (co-supervised with Dr. Loubna Mekouar)
  6. Ayoub El-Khouzari — Trustworthy and Explainable AI for Multimodal Eye Disease Detection (co-supervised with Dr. Loubna Mekouar)
  7. Youness Soussou — Improved Subspace Clustering for Recommender Systems (co-supervised with Dr. Loubna Mekouar)
  8. Charaf Taii — Next Generation Recommender Systems (co-supervised with Dr. Loubna Mekouar)
  9. Nawfal Abbassi — Fake News Detection and Robust Federated Recommender Systems (co-supervised with Dr. Loubna Mekouar)

Former Graduate Students

Ph.D.

  1. Shibani Hamsa — Emotion Recognition from Speech and Video · Khalifa University · 2024 (co-supervised with Dr. Naoufel Werghi)
  2. Mahmoud Khonji — Electronic Text Stylometry · Khalifa University · 2017
  3. Samira Al Mualla — Forensics in Cloud Computing · Khalifa University · 2017 (co-supervised with Dr. Ernesto Damiani)

M.Sc.

  1. Ammar Battah — Implementing a Trust Framework for Internet of Things · Khalifa University · 2021 (co-supervised with Prof. Ernesto Damiani)
  2. Nassra Al Nuaimi — Trust Management in Cloud Computing · Khalifa University · 2019 (co-supervised with Dr. Chan Yeob Yeun)
  3. Mahmoud Khonji — Mitigation of Phishing Attacks · Khalifa University · 2012 (co-supervised with Dr. Andrew Jones)

Contact

Address College of Computing, UM6P, Lot 660, Hay Moulay Rachid, Benguerir 43150, Morocco Email Youssef [dot] Iraqi [at] um6p [dot] ma Scholar Google Scholar Profile ORCID 0000-0003-0112-2600 Scopus 6603845850 Lab github.com/MANARA-Lab-UM6P

Selected Honors & Awards

  • 2nd place, SICS-155 Challenge, MICCAI 2025, September 2025.
  • Best Organizer of an IWCMC Edition, IWCMC 2023, Marrakech, Morocco.
  • Best Student Paper Award, INTECH 2016 / IWCSF 2016, Dublin, Ireland.
  • First place, Authorship Verification task, PAN 2014.
  • Best Paper Award, ICITST 2011.
  • IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize Paper Award, 2008.
  • Best Paper Award, MMNS 2003.