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 30,000 citations over the last five years (2018 to 2023), yielding a Google Scholar h-index of 88. 

Khoshgoftaar is the first FAU faculty to garner these many citations within a five-year period and is one of the most highly cited professors in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science within Florida’s State University System. 

“It is incredibly rewarding and humbling to be recognized as a highly cited Google Scholar and knowing that researchers and scientists around the world are using my published 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. He has published more than 850 refereed journal and conference papers in these fields.

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 percent of research papers have more than 1,000 citations.

“Professor Khoshgoftaar is a leading expert in his field both nationally and internationally and he has had a major impact on 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 extremely proud of this major milestone in his academic career and for his accomplishments as a scientist and prolific author of papers, books and other publications that have been highly cited by researchers worldwide.” 

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 taught nine undergraduate courses, three of which are new undergraduate courses he developed, and 13 graduate courses, 12 of which are 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, and developed and taught two new graduate courses as part of the NSF grant. He was also 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 directed the completion of 38 Ph.D. dissertations and 64 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 resulting in the generation of millions of dollars for the college and the university. He received two highly competitive NSF MRI grants: 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-