Research

Research Interests

• Trustworthy & Explainable AI — Explainable AI (XAI), trust and fairness in AI systems, blockchain-based and cross-domain recommender systems, authorship verification and stylometry.
• Wireless Networks & Networked Systems — 5G/6G communications, NOMA, IRS-assisted communications, Internet of Things (IoT), resource management in wireless networks.
• Security, Privacy & Blockchain — Physical layer security, trust and reputation management, federated learning with privacy guarantees, cloud forensics, decentralized systems.
• Speech & Affective Computing — Speaker identification, speech emotion recognition, overlapping speech detection, multimodal audio-visual processing.
• Healthcare AI & Medical Imaging — AI-driven clinical decision support, cardiovascular risk prediction, medical image analysis.
• Mobile Crowdsensing — Task allocation, location privacy, crowdsensing frameworks.

Selected Recent Publications

• Tasneem Assaf, Arafat Al-Dweik, Youssef Iraqi, Zhiguo Ding, and Anshul Pandey, "Physical Layer Security for NOMA-OFDM using Power Hopping." IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2026.
• Shibani Hamsa, Youssef Iraqi, Ismail Shahin, Ernesto Damiani, Kinda Khalaf, Herbert Jelinek, and Naoufel Werghi, "Emotion and Noise-Robust Speaker Identification via Filter-Free Self-Supervised Learning." Information Processing and Management, 2026.
• Simon Mueller, ..., Yasser El Jarida, Youssef Iraqi, Loubna Mekouar, et al., "Advancing Automated Phase Recognition in Cataract Surgery through the SICS-155 Challenge." Medical Image Analysis, 2026.
• Yassin Terraf, Youssef Iraqi, Arafat Al-Dweik, Anshul Pandey, and Jean-Pierre Giacalone, "Jamming Detection at the Application Layer Using Deep Learning: A Transfer Learning Approach." IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, Vol. 7, 2026.
• Yassin Terraf and Youssef Iraqi, "CAT-Net: A Channel and Self-Attention TCN for Robust Frame-Level Overlapping Speech Detection." IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2026.
• Imane Akdim, Loubna Mekouar, and Youssef Iraqi, "Trust in Recommender Systems: A Survey." Expert Systems with Applications, Vol. 298, March 2026.
• Nawfal Abbassi, Loubna Mekouar, and Youssef Iraqi, "Federated Matrix Factorization under Local Differential Privacy via Directional Noise." IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2026.
• Abderrafi Abdeddine, Youssef Iraqi, and Loubna Mekouar, "An Efficient Task Allocation in Mobile Crowdsensing Environments." IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2025.

Full publication list on Google Scholar. Code and datasets for recent papers at the MANARA Lab GitHub organization.

US Patent Application

• Tasneem Assaf, Arafat Al-Dweik, Youssef Iraqi, Zhiguo Ding, and Anshul Pandey, Instantaneous Power Allocation for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access, US Non-Provisional Patent Application No. 19/665,721, filed May 1, 2026.

US Patents

• Arafat Al-Dweik, Youssef Iraqi, and Ashfaq Ahmed, Dropped-Packets Repair and Recovery for Delay-Tolerant Wireless Systems Using Retroactive Interference Cancellation, US 12,381,829, August 5, 2025.
• Arafat Al-Dweik and Youssef Iraqi, OFDM Communication System with Enhanced Channel Estimation and Data Detection Techniques, US 10,484,226 B2, November 19, 2019.
• Arafat Al-Dweik, Youssef Iraqi, and Mohammed Al-Mualla, Digital Communications Receiver Using Partial Knowledge of the Channel State Information. Continuation Patent. US 9,954,699, April 24, 2018.
• Arafat Al-Dweik, Youssef Iraqi, and Mohamed Al-Mualla, Digital Communications Receiver Using Partial Knowledge of the Channel State Information, US 9,509,538 B1, November 29, 2016.
• Harish Bhaskar, Youssef Iraqi, and Sultan Al Sharif, Human Eye Controlled Computer Mouse Interface, US 9,075,453 B2, July 7, 2015.