Haitham Safwat Hamza (Senior ACM Member ’17) is the Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Artificial Intelligence at Cairo University. Since December 2023, Haitham has been appointed as the Chairman of the Software Engineering Competence Center (SECC) of Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) at MCIT. He has 20+ years of academic and industrial experience in the ICT sector.

During his tenure in ITIDA-SECC, Dr. Hamza had played several roles and led several initiatives including initiated the Africa-Middle East Conference on Software Engineering (AMECSE), developed of the IoT-Egypt Forum, and served as the ICT National Contact Point of the EU H2020 Framework. From 2012-2015, he managed and coordinated the FP7 EU funded Project RECOCAPE with Spain, Finland and Italy. Dr. Hamza holds several IT practitioner certifications in various frameworks including: Open Data Accredited Trainer (ODI-London), ITIL4 Master, COBIT Assessor, and TOGAF L 2. He delivered more than 85 courses in ITIDA in various IT and software engineering topics. In addition, he delivered several assessments and consultation services to companies in Egypt and abroad in various sectors including healthcare, telecom, and education.

From 2019-2023, Haitham served as the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, where he head the Central Department of Scientific Missions and Cultural Relations. During the same period, he served as a board member in the Fulbright commission in Egypt.

Dr. Hamza obtained his B.Sc. and the M.Sc. Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University in 1998 and 2001; respectively, and the M.Sc. (Software Engineering) and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the university of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA in 2002 and 2006; respectively. He supervised more than 30 Ph.D. and Master thesis, and published more than 120 papers in top IEEE and ACM journals and conferences.