He is a full Professor of Computer Engineering and Director of Affective Human Computing for Smart Environment Centre at University of the West of Scotland.  He received the M.Sc. degree in telecommunication from University of Brest, France, in 2004 and the Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering from Queen Mary University of London, London, U.K, in 2008.  Currently he is a full Professor at the School of Engineering and Computing, University of the West of Scotland. He has over 14 years of experience in the field of Multimedia Signal Processing, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Multimedia Search and Retrieval, Computer Vision, Deep Learning Techniques, Big Data Analytics and eHealth. He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a senior member of IEEE. He served as a Guest Editor for a number of special issues in technical journals. He has organized and co-chaired three ACM Multimedia Workshops, and served as the Session Chair/Co-Chair for a number of conferences. He is the Co-Chair of the Ultra HD Group of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG); the Co-Editor-in-Chief of VQEG E-Letter and a voting member of British Standard Institutions (BSI). He has co-authored a book entitled “Taxonomy Matching Using Background Knowledge” and co-edited a book entitled Social Media Retrieval [Springer, 2013]. He is the winner of STARS (Staff Appreciation and Recognition Scheme) Award 2015 and 2017 for “Outstanding Research and Knowledge Exchange”; 2019 for “Outstanding Leadership” in UWS.  He has published more than 150 research publications.