Professor Mufti Mahmud is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia. His work focuses on explainable, multimodal and privacy-preserving AI for healthcare, ageing, education for low-resource settings. He has authored over 400 peer-reviewed articles and edited more than 60 volumes. His funding portfolio consists of over USD 5 million in competitive grants. He received the Marie-Curie Fellowship, the Vice-Chancellor’s Outstanding Researcher Award at NTU, and the Distinguished Professorship Award at KFUPM. He regularly serves as a grant evaluator for major funding agencies such as the European Union, national funding programmes of the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Kuwait, Singapore and Brazil, and also serves as an elected governor of the Asia Pacific Neural Network Society.