ACU Researcher

Associate Professor Dr Walayat Hussain

Information Technology and Systems
Peter Faber Business School (Sydney)

Areas of expertise: Artificial Intelligence; Responsible and Explainable AI; Agentic AI and AI Safety; Agentic Orchestration; Business Intelligence; Machine Learning; Decision Support Systems; Information Systems; Service, Cloud and Edge Computing; Internet of Things; and Computational Intelligence.

Location: ACU North Sydney Campus 

ORCID: 0000-0003-0610-4006

HDR Supervisor accreditation status: HDR Supervisor (Full)

Availability: PhD or Masters Research supervision — topics include agentic AI and AI red-teaming, explainable and responsible AI, AI-enabled decision support, AI in education, agentic systems for service and cloud QoS prediction, and business analytics; collaborative research projects; industry partnerships and consultancy.

Associate Professor Walayat Hussain is an artificial intelligence and information systems scholar with more than two decades of experience across academia, research leadership and industry. He is Director of the Artificial Intelligence for Decision Excellence (AIDX) Lab at ACU and previously served for two and a half years as Head of the Information Technology and Systems discipline in the Peter Faber Business School. He is also an Adjunct Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of Technology Sydney. Before joining ACU he held academic appointments at Victoria University Melbourne and the University of Technology Sydney, as well as overseas.

His research develops AI-enabled methods for reliable, explainable and optimal decision-making in complex systems. He has contributed to both theory and practice, including a new algorithmic approach that integrates Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operators with artificial intelligence to support informed decision-making under uncertainty. Through the AIDX Lab he leads a program of work spanning decision support systems, agentic and responsible AI, machine learning, service, cloud and edge computing, the Internet of Things and business intelligence, with applications across education, healthcare, energy, transport and financial services.

Associate Professor Hussain has published more than 110 scholarly outputs, including papers in top-ranked ERA A*, ERA A and JCR/SJR Q1 journals such as Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Omega, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Information Sciences, Digital Health and Digital Communications and Networks. As of August 2026, his scholarly contributions have attracted more than 3,700 citations, with a Google Scholar h-index of 34 and an i10-index of 65. His work reflects a strong international collaborative footprint, with 94 co-authors across 39 countries, and has achieved substantial visibility, with more than 76,000 reads on ResearchGate.

He is an ACU-accredited Full HDR Supervisor and has supervised thirteen higher degree research students to completion as principal and co-supervisor. He currently leads an industry-based doctoral collaboration with industry investigating how human experts and agentic AI systems can work together to red-team AI systems and strengthen their security, safety and trustworthiness.

Associate Professor Hussain has authored, edited or co-edited nine scholarly books and proceedings volumes with leading international publishers including Elsevier, Springer, EAI/Springer, CRC Press and Chapman & Hall. His most recent volumes are Transforming Mathematics Education in the Artificial Intelligence Era (Springer, 2026), AI-Driven Mathematics Education: From Digital Tools to Ethical Teaching Practices (Springer, 2026), Cutting-Edge Artificial Intelligence: Advances and Implications in Real-World Applications (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2025) and Advances in Complex Decision Making: Using Machine Learning and Tools for Service-Oriented Computing (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2024). He also has a forthcoming volume, Agentic AI in Education (Elsevier), currently in production.

He serves as an Associate Editor for Alexandria Engineering Journal, IET Communications and Forecasting, and sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of the International Journal of Web Information Systems. He has also acted as lead or co-guest editor for more than 35 international journal special issues, including Computer Networks, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, International Journal of Communication Systems, Service Oriented Computing and Applications, IET Software and Expert Systems.

Associate Professor Hussain has held key leadership roles in international conferences, including General Chair of the 7th EAI International Conference on IoT as a Service (IoTaaS 2021) in Sydney; General Co-Chair of the 3rd (2022, India and Sydney) and 6th (2026, India) International Conferences on MMCITRE and of the 3rd BiGIoT-EDU Conference (2023) in China; and Technical Program Committee Chair of the 2nd BiGIoT-EDU (2022) in China. He is a Fellow of the European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) and a member of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Australian Computer Society (ACS).

He has secured more than A$800,000 in research, industry and community funding as Chief Investigator and Co-Investigator from national and international funding bodies, supporting work in AI-enabled facilities management, data integration, cloud services, decision support and inclusive educational robotics. This includes the A$122,868 Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) project he led, which delivered a free five-day robotics and coding program for 43 Year 10 students from low socio-economic and underrepresented communities across Western Sydney, with each participant receiving an iPad and a programmable robot to keep learning at home.

His achievements have been recognised through the Amity Research Excellence Award (2026), the National Research Award in Computer Science from the Government of Oman (2021), the VUBS Award for Excellence in Research (2022), the Best Paper Award at IoTaaS Australia (2021), Best Paper Awards at 3PGCIC in Poland and South Korea (2015, 2016) and the FEIT Publication Award from the University of Technology Sydney (2016).

Associate Professor Hussain is a regular commentator on the responsible use of artificial intelligence. He has provided expert analysis for SBS News on autonomous-AI cybersecurity and safety governance and on the environmental footprint of AI data centres, for ABC News on AI-assisted tax preparation and on inclusive STEM participation, and for AAP and The Canberra Times on MonoFG, an AI-powered monocular-camera system designed to lower the cost of autonomous driving. He also convenes industry-facing student initiatives through the AIDX Lab, including an IT Boot Camp delivered with TechSkills Institute for close to 80 ACU students in 2026.

Website

Google scholar

Research interests

Artificial intelligence; agentic AI; AI safety, red-teaming and trustworthy AI; explainable and responsible AI; machine learning and deep learning; large language models; decision support systems; multi-criteria and complex decision-making; ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operators; computational intelligence and fuzzy systems; service, cloud and edge computing; quality of service (QoS) prediction; Internet of Things; business intelligence and analytics; AI in education; AI in healthcare; bibliometric and scientometric analysis.

Select publications

• Aleassa, O., Bekhit, M., Hussain, W. and Fattah, I.M.R. (2026). Harnessing AI-driven large language models (LLMs) for enhanced forecasting and optimisation of wind and solar energy generation and load demand profiles. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 239, 117171.
• Akram, J., Hussain, W., Jhaveri, R.H., Rathore, R.S. and Anaissi, A. (2025). Dynamic GNN-based multimodal anomaly detection for spatial crowdsourcing drone services. Digital Communications and Networks, 11(5), 1639–1656.
• Hussain, W., Merigó, J.M., Rahimi, I. and Lev, B. (2024). Half a century of Omega – The International Journal of Management Science: A bibliometric analysis. Omega, 133, 103226.
• Hussain, W., Mabrok, M., Gao, H., Rabhi, F.A. and Rashed, E.A. (2024). Revolutionising healthcare with artificial intelligence: A bibliometric analysis of 40 years of progress in health systems. Digital Health, 10.
• Gao, H., Yu, X., Xu, Y., Ran, Q. and Hussain, W. (2024). MonoFG: Monocular 3D object detection with knowledge distillation for human-centric autonomous driving systems. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems.
• Gao, H., Fang, D., Xiao, J., Hussain, W. and Kim, J.Y. (2023). CAMRL: A joint method of channel attention and multidimensional regression loss for 3D object detection in automated vehicles. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 24(8), 8831–8845.
• Hussain, W., Merigó, J.M., Gao, H., Alkalbani, A.M. and Rabhi, F.A. (2023). Integrated AHP-IOWA, POWA framework for ideal cloud provider selection and optimum resource management. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 16, 370–382.
• Hussain, W., Raza, M.R., Jan, M.A., Merigó, J.M. and Gao, H. (2022). Cloud risk management with OWA-LSTM predictive intelligence and fuzzy linguistic decision making. IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, 30(11), 4657–4666.
• Hussain, W., Merigó, J.M., Raza, M.R. and Gao, H. (2022). A new QoS prediction model using hybrid IOWA-ANFIS with fuzzy C-means, subtractive clustering and grid partitioning. Information Sciences, 584, 280–300.

Books and edited volumes

• Agentic AI in Education (forthcoming). Elsevier. In production.
• Sahni, M., León-Castro, E., Hussain, W. and Gourisaria, M.K. (eds) (2026). Transforming Mathematics Education in the Artificial Intelligence Era. Springer, Lecture Notes in Educational Technology.
• Sahni, M., León-Castro, E. and Hussain, W. (eds) (2026). AI-Driven Mathematics Education: From Digital Tools to Ethical Teaching Practices. Springer, Studies in Big Data, vol. 201.
• Hussain, W., Martínez López, L., Sahni, M., Chen, Z.-S. and Liu, J. (eds) (2025). Cutting-Edge Artificial Intelligence: Advances and Implications in Real-World Applications. Chapman & Hall / CRC Press. Lead editor.
• Hussain, W., Gao, H., Rabhi, F. and Martínez, L. (eds) (2024). Advances in Complex Decision Making: Using Machine Learning and Tools for Service-Oriented Computing. Chapman & Hall / CRC Press. Lead editor.
• Sahni, M., Merigó, J.M. and Hussain, W. (eds) (2023). Novel Developments in Futuristic AI-based Technologies. Springer, Algorithms for Intelligent Systems.
• Sahni, M., Merigó, J.M., Hussain, W., León-Castro, E., Verma, R.K. and Sahni, R. (eds) (2023). Mathematical Modeling, Computational Intelligence Techniques and Renewable Energy: Proceedings of MMCITRE 2022. Springer, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 1440.
• Hussain, W. and Jan, M.A. (eds) (2022). IoT as a Service: 7th EAI International Conference, IoTaaS 2021, Sydney. Springer, LNICST vol. 421. Lead editor.
• Gao, H., Kim, J.Y., Hussain, W., Iqbal, M. and Duan, Y. (eds) (2022). Intelligent Processing Practices and Tools for E-Commerce Data, Information and Knowledge. EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing.

Research projects and funding

• Agentic hybrid human–AI red teaming orchestration (2026–). Industry co-funded doctoral collaboration between ACU and Multinational SaaS provider serving more than 5,000 organisations. Project lead and principal supervisor, total program A$207,129. The project investigates how human experts and agentic AI systems can jointly red-team AI systems — designing intelligent task allocation, human-in-the-loop interfaces and evaluation metrics aligned to international AI safety standards.
• LLM-Based AI Pricing for Facilities Management and Infrastructure Contracts (2026). Investment NSW, A$100,000. In collaboration with an industry procurement-technology partner, this project is developing an AI-driven pricing tool that uses large language models to improve cost estimation, forecast risk and streamline procurement for facilities management and infrastructure contracts. Associate Professor Hussain leads the research and validation of the underlying AI methodologies at ACU, with the industry partner responsible for system integration and commercial deployment.
• Robotics and coding for STEM equity (2025). Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP), A$122,868. Project lead. A free five-day robotics and coding program delivered at ACU Blacktown for 43 Year 10 students from low socio-economic and underrepresented communities across Western Sydney, with each participant receiving an iPad and a Sphero RVR+ robot to continue learning at home.
• Additional funded research. Chief Investigator and Co-Investigator on further national and international research, industry and community projects spanning cloud service selection and quality-of-service prediction, data integration, business analytics and decision support, and AI applications in health and renewable-energy systems. Total research, industry and community funding across his career exceeds A$800,000.

Awards and honours

• Amity Research Excellence Award, 2026
• Fellow, European Alliance for Innovation (EAI), 2022
• National Research Award in Computer Science, Government of Oman, 2021
• VUBS Award for Excellence in Research, Victoria University, 2022
• Best Paper Award, EAI IoTaaS, Australia, 2021
• Best Paper Awards, 3PGCIC, Poland (2015) and South Korea (2016)
• FEIT Publication Award, University of Technology Sydney, 2016

Editorial and professional roles

• Associate Editor: Alexandria Engineering Journal; IET Communications; Forecasting.
• Editorial Advisory Board: International Journal of Web Information Systems.
• Guest editor: lead or co-guest editor of more than 35 international journal special issues, including Computer Networks, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, International Journal of Communication Systems, Service Oriented Computing and Applications, IET Software and Expert Systems.
• Conference leadership: General Chair, 7th EAI International Conference on IoT as a Service (IoTaaS 2021), Sydney; General Co-Chair, 3rd (2022, India and Sydney) and 6th (2026, India) International Conferences on MMCITRE, and 3rd BiGIoT-EDU (2023), China; Technical Program Committee Chair, 2nd BiGIoT-EDU (2022), China.
• Professional memberships: IEEE; Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); Australian Computer Society (ACS).

Media and public engagement

• SBS News (2026) — expert commentary on autonomous-AI security incidents, containment, monitoring and independent safety testing.
• SBS News (2026) — expert commentary on the water, energy and carbon footprint of AI data centres and the case for transparent reporting.
• ABC News (2025) — featured expert on AI-assisted tax preparation, accuracy and professional judgement.
• ABC News (2025) — profiled as project lead of an inclusive robotics and coding program for Western Sydney students.
• AAP / The Canberra Times (2025) — national coverage of MonoFG, an AI-powered monocular-camera system designed to lower the cost of autonomous driving.
• ACU News (2025) — “AI takes autonomous cars from sci-fi to the driveway”.