Dr. Fahed Alkhabbas
Senior Lecturer and Researcher of Intelligent and Sustainable Systems
Co-director of the IoT Master's programme
Malmö University, Sweden
Sustainable Digitalization Research Center
Senior Lecturer and Researcher of Intelligent and Sustainable Systems
Co-director of the IoT Master's programme
Malmö University, Sweden
Sustainable Digitalization Research Center
I am a Swedish Palestinian computer scientist with over 15 years of experience in both industrial and academic fields. I am currently a senior lecturer and researcher in computer science at Malmö University. I am also a senior researcher at the Sustainable Digitalization Research Center (SDRC).
My research focuses on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet of Things. I'm particularly interested in engineering intelligent, sustainable, context-aware, self-adaptive, and trustworthy systems.
I currently serve as co-director of the two-year Master Programme in Internet of Things at Malmö University.
With 7+ years of industrial experience, I have led large-scale software development projects in various roles including IoT Solution Architect, Technical Program Manager, and Information Manager. My industrial work spans companies like CGI, Freightos, GVC Italia, and Tetra Tech DPK.
With over 7 years of industry experience, I have worked in various technical leadership roles, managing teams and delivering large-scale software solutions for international organizations.
CGI, Malmö, Sweden
Led the development of a smart office solution using Azure Cloud computing, ambient sensors, actuators, Raspberry Pi gateways, Java, Spring Boot, and REST services.
Hadicare AB, Malmö, Sweden
Elicited and analyzed requirements for akonamatata.se marketplace and performed acceptance testing.
Freightos, Ramallah, Palestine
Managed two teams developing a large-scale freight automation platform using Google Cloud Platform, Scrum, and Agile methodologies.
GVC Italia, Ramallah, Palestine
Headed the IT and Software Development Department, leading the development of a data-driven platform with automated calculation of complex KPIs using Google Open Data Kit technology.
Tetra Tech DPK, Ramallah, Palestine
Managed a team of six software engineers to extend a large-scale system and integrate it with third-party systems using service-oriented technology.
United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), Ramallah, Palestine
Developed software components using Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for service and business process integration.
8. Alkhabbas, F., De Sanctis, M., Spalazzese, R., Davidsson, P., and Jacobsson, A. (2025). Quality characteristics in IoT systems: learnings from an industry multi case study. Discover Internet of Things, 5(1), Article 13. Springer Nature.
7. Fakhouri, H. N., Alawadi, S., Awaysheh, F. M., Alkhabbas, F., and Zraqou, J. (2024). A cognitive deep learning approach for medical image processing. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 4539. Springer Nature.
6. Kebande, V. R., Awaysheh, F. M., Palomba, F., Awad, M., and Alkhabbas, F. (2024). FedCSD: A Federated Learning Based Approach for Code-Smell Detection. IEEE Access, 12, 44888–44904. IEEE.
5. Fernandez-Delgado, M., Mera, D., Alkhabbas, F., Olsson, C. M., and Davidsson, P. (2022). A comparison of machine learning algorithms for forecasting indoor temperature in smart buildings. Energy Systems, 13(3), 689–705. Springer.
4. Alkhabbas, F., Alsadi, M., Alawadi, S., Awaysheh, F. M., Kebande, V. R., Moghaddam, M. T., Mera, D., Fernandez-Delgado, M., Olsson, C. M., and Davidsson, P. (2022). ASSERT: A Blockchain-Based Architectural Approach for Engineering Secure Self-Adaptive IoT Systems. Sensors, 22(18), 6842. MDPI.
3. Alkhabbas, F., Spalazzese, R., and Davidsson, P. (2020). An agent-based approach to realize emergent configurations in the Internet of Things. Electronics, 9(9), 1347. MDPI.
2. Reggio, G., Leotta, M., Cerioli, M., Spalazzese, R., and Alkhabbas, F. (2020). What are IoT systems for real? An experts' survey on software engineering aspects. Internet of Things, 12, 100313. Elsevier.
1. Alkhabbas, F., Spalazzese, R., and Davidsson, P. (2019). Characterizing Internet of Things Systems through Taxonomies: A Systematic Mapping Study. Internet of Things, 7, 100084. Elsevier.
17. Alawadi, S., Awaysheh, F. M., Thambugala Athukoralalage Jayani Sandunka Athukorala, Gande, S., and Alkhabbas, F. (2025). A Personalized and Explainable Federated Learning Approach for Recommendation Systems. In Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing and Communications (EDGE 2025), Helsinki, Finland, July 7–12, 2025, pp. 167–176. IEEE.
16. Alkhabbas, F., Alawadi, S., Fakhouri, H., Awaysheh, F. M., Ayyad, M., and Abdullah Mohammed (2025). Towards a Sustainable Workflow Scheduling Framework in Edge-Cloud Infrastructures. In 2025 Tenth International Conference on Fog and Mobile Edge Computing (FMEC 2025), Tampa, Florida, USA. IEEE, to appear.
15. Spalazzese, R., De Sanctis, M., Jacobsson, A., Alkhabbas, F., and Davidsson, P. (2025). A Conceptual Model for Trustworthiness in Intelligent IoT Systems. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Practices for the Internet of Things (SERP4IoT 2025). IEEE/ACM.
14. Fakhouri, H., Alkhabbas, F., Alawadi, S., and Awaysheh, F. M. (2025). An Optimized Multi-Objective Task Scheduling Approach for IoT Systems in the Edge-Cloud Continuum. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Computational Intelligence Approaches and Applications (ICCIAA 2025). IEEE.
13. Fakhouri, H. N., Alawadi, S., Awaysheh, F. M., Alkhabbas, F., and co-authors (2025). Wave: A Dynamic Physical-Based Metaheuristic Optimizer. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Computational Intelligence Approaches and Applications (ICCIAA 2025). IEEE.
12. Alkhabbas, F., Alawadi, S., Ayyad, M., Spalazzese, R., and Davidsson, P. (2023). ART4FL: An Agent-based Architectural Approach for Trustworthy Federated Learning in the IoT. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Fog and Mobile Edge Computing (FMEC 2023), Tartu, Estonia, 18-20 Sept. 2023, pp. 270-275. IEEE.
11. Spalazzese, R., De Sanctis, M., Alkhabbas, F., and Davidsson, P. (2023). Shaping IoT Systems Together: The User-System Mixed-Initiative Paradigm and Its Challenges. In Software Architecture: 17th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2023), Istanbul, Turkey, Sept. 18-22, 2023, pp. 221-229. Springer.
10. Alkhabbas, F., Spalazzese, R., and Davidsson, P. (2021). Human-Centric Emergent Configurations: Supporting the User Through Self-configuring IoT Systems. In Advances in Neuroergonomics and Cognitive Engineering: Proceedings of the AHFE 2021 Virtual Conferences, pp. 411-418. Springer.
9. Alkhabbas, F., Murturi, I., Spalazzese, R., Davidsson, P., and Dustdar, S. (2020). A Goal-driven Approach for Deploying Self-adaptive IoT Systems. In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2020), Salvador, Brazil, Mar. 16-20, 2020, pp. 146-156. IEEE.
8. Alkhabbas, F., Spalazzese, R., Cerioli, M., Leotta, M., and Reggio, G. (2020). On the Deployment of IoT Systems: An Industrial Survey. In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C 2020), Salvador, Brazil, Mar. 16-20, 2020. IEEE.
7. Alkhabbas, F., Alawadi, S., Spalazzese, R., and Davidsson, P. (2020). Activity Recognition and User Preference Learning for Automated Configuration of IoT Environments. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT '20), Malmo, Sweden, Oct. 6-9, 2020, Article 3. ACM.
6. Alkhabbas, F., Spalazzese, R., and Davidsson, P. (2018). ECo-IoT: An Architectural Approach for Realizing Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2018), Madrid, Spain, pp. 86-102. Springer.
5. De Sanctis, M., Spalazzese, R., Alkhabbas, F., Bucchiarone, A., Davidsson, P., and Marconi, A. (2018). Enacting Emergent Configurations in the IoT Through Domain Objects. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2018), Zhejiang, China, Nov. 12-15, 2018. Springer.
4. Alkhabbas, F. (2018). An Approach to Engineer and Realize Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE 2018), Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 448-449. ACM.
3. Alkhabbas, F., Spalazzese, R., and Davidsson, P. (2017). Architecting Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2017), Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 221-224. IEEE.
2. Alkhabbas, F., Spalazzese, R., and Davidsson, P. (2017). Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things as System of Systems. In Proceedings of the Joint 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Systems-of-Systems (SESoS) and 11th Workshop on Distributed Software Development, Software Ecosystems and Systems-of-Systems (WDES), Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 23, 2017, pp. 70-71. IEEE.
1. Alkhabbas, F., Ayyad, M., Mihailescu, R.-C., and Davidsson, P. (2017). A Commitment-Based Approach to Realize Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ICSAW 2017), Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 88-91. IEEE.
I have taught over 12 distinct courses at Malmö University, many of which multiple times, covering a wide range of topics in Computer Science at different levels and in different programs.
MSc course (15 hp) - Course co-coordinator, Lecturer, and examiner
Spring 2023-2024, 2024-2025Number of students: 24. My main focus is on engineering software architectures for intelligent IoT systems.
MSc course (15 hp) - Lecturer and Lab supervisor
Fall 2023-2024, 2024-2025Number of students: 24. I give lectures about Cloud Computing Infrastructures and models. Further, I gave lectures about Spark for big data analysis, Spark SQL, and Spark Streaming. I also designed lab sessions to build students' capabilities in Spark.
MSc course (15 hp) - Lecturer and Lab supervisor
Fall 2023-2024, 2024-2025Number of students: 20. I give lectures about IoT communication technologies, IoT systems' architecture, and Cloud platforms. I also designed lab sessions to enable students to: 1) connect Arduino boards to AWS IoT Core; 2) Read sensors data using MQTT and REST; 3) Send commands to actuators; 4) Store sensors' data in NOSQL databases; 5) Processing sensors data stream via serverless lambda functions.
Bachelor course (7.5 hp) - Lecturer and Lab supervisor
Spring 2022-2023Number of students: 40-50. I gave lectures about key-value, graph, and document databases. During the lectures, I presented multiple NoSQL database engines, including Riak, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J. Further, I also introduced MapReduce, Hadoop, Hive, and Pig. During the labs, I develop step-by-step demos in Java and Python to show the students how to install and use the NOSQL database engines and related technologies in practice.
Bachelor course (7.5 hp) - Co-organizer, lecturer, and examiner
Spring 2019-2020 to 2023-2024Number of students: 80-110. In the 2022-2023 Spring edition of this course, I become the leading course co-organizer. To improve the quality of the course, I have collected and analyzed the students' feedback from the last years and redesigned the course. In particular, I redesigned the assignments and the final project of the course. Moreover, together with the other co-organizer colleague, we developed the lectures to cover more interesting and hot topics about software architecture. Finally, I designed practical seminars where I develop step-by-step demos in Java to show the students how to realize design patterns in practice.
Master and Bachelor levels (7.5 hp) - Lecturer, discussion sessions' co-organizer, and examiner
Fall 2017-2018 to 2021-2022Number of students: 20-35. I have given lectures about conducting systematic mapping studies and literature reviews. Moreover, I co-led and co-managed the discussion sessions in the course. For this purpose, we selected industrial case studies that are interesting and relevant to the course topics and asked the students to discuss in groups questions we specified before the discussion sessions. During the sessions, we managed the discussions in a way so the students think critically about the different perspectives, especially when they have opposing points of views. Thanks to my industrial experience, I could provide realistic scenarios from the industry to make the discussion more interesting and fruitful.
Bachelor course (15 hp) - Lecturer and examiner
Spring 2017-2018 to 2020-2021Number of students: 20-30. I gave (practical) lectures about Google analytics platform and tools that can be used to evaluate the usability of websites e.g., through performing performance, readability, learnability, and other tests.
Bachelor course (7.5 hp) - Lecturer and examiner
Spring 2019-2020 to 2023-2024Number of students: 30-40. I gave lectures about software architectures, developed assignments, and evaluated final exams.
Bachelor course (7.5 hp) - Co-organizer, lecturer, lab supervisor, and examiner
Spring 2019-2020 to 2022-2023Number of students: 70-90. I gave a lecture on the connectivity of applications (developed in Java, Python, or C) to databases (PostgreSQL, MSQL). In addition to the theoretical knowledge presented in the lecture, I also show live demos. Moreover, I am responsible for the final project module, including the evaluation of students' group projects. Finally, I supervise the assistants in the lab and support them when they face (technical) blockers.
Bachelor course (7.5 hp) - Lab supervisor and examiner
Spring 2017-2018 to 2018-2019Number of students: 90-120. I have supported students to solve lab assignments and evaluated final exams.
I have supervised multiple Bachelor and Master theses on topics related to IoT, Blockchain, Software Architecture, and related fields.
I serve as a reviewer for several prestigious journals and conferences in the field of computer science, software engineering, and IoT systems. My expertise allows me to evaluate cutting-edge research in these domains.
I have been actively involved in organizing several international conferences and workshops:
The Fifth Intelligent Cybersecurity Conference (ICSC2025)
The 11th International Conference on Internet of Things: Systems, Management and Security (IOTSMS 2024)
The 2nd IEEE International Conference on Federated Learning Technologies and Applications (FLTA24)
International Conference in Software Engineering (ICSE 2025)
An international conference focusing on federated learning and intelligent computing systems.
Conference WebsiteA conference dedicated to exploring human-AI interaction and experience design.
Conference WebsiteA multidisciplinary conference focusing on sustainability, innovation, and society.
Conference WebsiteAn intensive summer school program focused on generative AI technologies and applications.
School Website