Dr. Waseem Al Aqqad of WVU Tech

Resilience refers to the ability of a system to cope with fatal threats and bounce back (fully or partially)
from high-impact disruptions. From economic systems and organizations to various engineering systems,
many sectors of modern society consider resilience as an essential requirement and/or a major design
objective. Networks have been widely used as a model of numerous complex systems such as power
grids, financial transaction networks, communication networks such as the Internet, command and control
systems, etc. Therefore, a better understanding of the resilience of networks will be fundamental to the
improved designs and/or smoother operations of a wide range of real-world systems from critical
infrastructure to humanitarian aid. Dr. Al Aqqad will present a general modeling and simulation
framework that he developed to quantitatively evaluate the resilience of networked systems under two
types of failures: connectivity- and load-based.  

Biography:

Dr. Waseem Al Aqqad, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering atWest Virginia University Institute of Technology. He joined WVU
Tech in August 2023. Dr Waseem Al Aqqad completed his PhD on December 2022 with a
dissertation title “Dynamics and Resiliency of Networks With Concurrent Cascading Failure
And Self-Healing.”. Dr. Al Aqqad’s previous academic experience included a position as
Research Assistant at Texas A&M University-Kingsville from January 2020-December 2022.
He conducted research on the resiliency and dynamics of damaged complex networks against
cascading failure due to malicious attacks and developed a novel mitigation and self-healing
processes. Dr. Al Aqqad was also a lecturer at Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia, from
August 2015-December 2019. Dr. Al Aqqad has over seven publications and his research and
professional interests include span network security, wireless networks, cloud network
engineering, 5G, RF design and embedded systems.