Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar, Ph.D.

Florida Atlantic University’s Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar, Ph.D., the Motorola Endowed Chair Professor and director of the Data Mining and Machine Learning Lab in the College of Engineering and Computer Science , recently achieved a significant academic milestone. His scientific publications have garnered more than 63,500 citations during his distinguished career at FAU (1985 to present), yielding a Google Scholar h-index of 95.

Khoshgoftaar is the first FAU faculty to garner these many citations in the history of the university and is one of the most highly cited professors in the field of computer science with a research focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science within Florida’s State University System. Over the last five years (2019-24), he accumulated more than 41,000 citations on Google Scholar; and in a single year (2023), he garnered about 10,000 citations. A single paper published in 2019 accumulated more than 10,500 citations on Google Scholar. Khoshgoftaar has published more than 900 refereed journal and conference papers in these fields.

“Being acknowledged as a highly cited Google Scholar is both deeply gratifying and humbling, especially knowing that researchers and scientists worldwide are leveraging my work,” said Khoshgoftaar, whose research interests include big data analytics; data mining and machine learning; health informatics and bioinformatics; fraud detection; social network mining; security analytics; and software engineering.

Citations, in which one paper refers to earlier works, are the standard means by which authors acknowledge the source of their methods, ideas and findings, and often are used as a measure of a paper’s importance. According to Thomson Reuters, owner of the Science Citation Index (SCI), it takes a staggering 12,119 citations to reach the top 100 list. An earlier study in 2014, showed that only 0.026% of research papers have more than 1,000 citations.

“Professor Khoshgoftaar stands out as a prominent authority in his field on both national and international levels, significantly influencing computer science and engineering research and education over the years,” said Stella Batalama, Ph.D., dean, FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science. “We are immensely proud of this significant milestone in his academic journey and his remarkable achievements as a scientist and prolific author, with his papers, books, and other publications being extensively cited by researchers around the globe.”

Khoshgoftaar joined FAU in 1985 as an assistant professor and was later promoted to associate professor and then full professor. In 2014, he was selected by the College of Engineering and Computer Science to serve as the Motorola Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

During his tenure at FAU, he has taught nine undergraduate courses – three of which were new undergraduate courses he developed – and 13 graduate courses, 12 of which were new graduate courses he developed. He established the Big Data Training and Research Lab with support from the National Science Foundation, one of the first laboratories in Florida for big data analytics, as well as developed and taught two new graduate courses as part of the NSF grant. He also was among the first professors in the nation to develop and teach two new graduate courses in big data analytics with Hadoop and deep learning.

Khoshgoftaar has directed the completion of 40 Ph.D. dissertations and 65 master’s theses and received FAU’s “Inaugural Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award” for his contributions. In addition, he has consistently engaged in sponsored research activities including two NSF MRI grants related to Big Data and AI: the NSF-MRI Big Data Training and Research Laboratory grant where he served as the principal investigator; and the NSF-MRI Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning Training and Research Laboratory grant where he served as co-principal investigator.

He is a co-founder of many international conferences and workshops and has served on organizational and technical program committees for various international conferences, symposia and workshops. He has served as a keynote speaker at multiple international conferences and has given numerous invited talks at various venues.

Among his many contributions, Khoshgoftaar serves as co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Big Data. He served as co-chair of the IEEE Future Technology Summit in 2021, conference co-chair of the IEEE International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Applications in 2020, program chair of 2019 ISSAT International Conference on Data Science and Intelligent Systems, and conference chair of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications in 2019 in Boca Raton.

Since 2009, Khoshgoftaar has served as a member of the advisory committee of the International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering – SEKE, and since 2015, as a member of the steering committee of the IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration. He also serves as a member of FAU’s high performance computing committee for the new Master of Science degree program in data science and analytics.

Khoshgoftaar has received awards for numerous national and international keynote presentations at conferences worldwide and has been recognized for his Ph.D. student poster presentations, which have received accolades from industry.

-FAU-