Zoheir Sabeur

Professor Zoheir Sabeur is Professor of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Bournemouth University (2019–present) and Head of the Processes and Behaviour Understanding (PRO_BU) Research Group. He concurrently serves as Visiting Professor of Data Science at Colorado School of Mines (2017–present) and held the position of Science Director at the IT Innovation Centre, University of Southampton (2009–2019). Over three decades he has led more than 30 large-scale projects as Principal Investigator, securing over £12 million of funding from the European Commission, UKRI, DSTL, NERC, EPSRC and industry.

Education

• PhD in Theoretical Physics, University of Glasgow (1990)
• MSc in Theoretical Physics, University of Glasgow (1986)
• BSc First-Class Honours in Physics and Applied Mathematics, Université d'Oran (1984)
• Advanced Leadership Programme, Ashridge Business School (2011)

Research Interests

Professor Sabeur’s research focuses on the fundamental theory and application of data science and artificial intelligence to understand complex human, natural and industrial processes and behaviours. His work spans multi-modal sensing, big-data analytics and machine-learning algorithms that extract actionable knowledge from large heterogeneous datasets. Application domains include:

• Healthcare: AI-driven diagnostics and prognostics for chronic diseases such as COPD, asthma and cancers through omics and phenotypic data integration.
• Environmental & Climate: Earth-observation analytics for wildlife migration and climate-change impact assessment using satellite data and global grid systems.
• Maritime & Cyber-Physical Security: Real-time risk assessment for shipping in extreme environments, smart-city safety and critical-infrastructure protection using computer vision and sensor fusion.

Recent research has produced novel AI classifiers that analyse lung-auscultation audio signals to grade COPD severity, as well as digital-twin frameworks for detecting malicious behaviour in urban spaces.

Scientific Awards & Recognition

• Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS)
• Fellow of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology (FIMarEST)
• Chartered Engineer (CEng) and Chartered Physicist (CPhys)
• Multiple ORS Awards (1987, 1988, 1989)

Grants & Doctoral Supervision

Professor Sabeur has secured and led more than 40 funded projects since 1996, including recent grants such as INSIGHT (NIHR, 2024) and S4AllCities (H2020, 2020). He currently supervises three ongoing PhD students at Bournemouth University and has successfully graduated three others, covering topics from computational hydrodynamics to AI-based respiratory-disease analytics.

He welcomes enquiries from prospective postgraduate researchers interested in data science, AI and interdisciplinary applications under schemes such as UKRI and Horizon Europe.