Ahmed M. A. Sayed, PhD|MPhil|BSc|FHEA

One fully-funded PhD project to study Resource-Efficient Distributed LLM Inference in Networked-AI Systems for Chinese Applicants applying to China Scholarship Council (CSC) Studentship, if interested please reach out to me and see EECS CSC Studentships for more details - Deadline 28-Jan-2026.

Applications are open to S&E Underrepresented Group PhD studentship for Home UK applicants, if interested please reach out to me before the Deadline 28-Jan-2026.

Applications are open to Islamic Development Bank Scholarship for International students of eligible IsDB countries, if interested please reach out to me to discuss your application before the Deadline 29-Jan-2026.

We also welcome Visiting-PhD applications as Research Associates. If you are enrolled in a PhD-Program overseas and have funding for visiting our research group for up to 12 months (e.g., funding via China Scholarship Council (CSC)] funding or any other funding source), please reach out to me to discuss your visiting application.

If you are self-funded student, I am happy to consider your application. Otherwise, there are various scholarships available, check out the eligible scholarships for you by searching QMUL scholarship database and then get in touch with me.

TPC: ICML, ICLR, AAAI, USENIX ATC, ACM CoNEXT, WWW, IEEE ICNP, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE LCN, IEEE IPCCC, ACM MSWiM, DistributedML, EuroMLSys, FedEdge, NetLearn - IEEE HPSR, VTC, PST

Long-term Reviewer: IEEE/ACM ToN, IEEE TMC, TNNLS, IoTJ, JSAC, TIFS, TCC, TNSM, T-ITS, TMLCN, Proceedings of the IEEE - ACM TOMPECS - Elsevier ComNets, ComCom, FGCS, JPDC, etc

Organising Committee of the ACM/SIGCOMM International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), ACM CoNEXT 2024 (Los Angeles) and 2025 (Hong Kong).

Co-presented the tutorial “Advancing Federated Learning in Practice: From Theory to Real-World Edge Applications” at IEEE ICMLCN 2025, Barcelona.

Co-organised 1st International Workshop on Federated Edge AI (FedEdgeAI), IEEE ICDCS 2025.

Co-organised 3rd International Workshop on NETWORKED AI SYSTEMS (NetAISys), ACM MobiSys 2024.

Co-edited for Frontiers in HPC on the research topic of HPC for AI in Big Model Era.

Co-organising 5th International Workshop on Embedded and Mobile Deep learning (EMDL), ACM MobiSys 2021 - Deadline 07-May-2021.

JISC OA agreements helps with publishing free open-access in wide range of publishers, see List of 58 Publishers. Please reach out to me for more details.

Springer-Egypt OA agreement to help with publishing free open-access in all Open-Access and Hybrid journals in Springer and SpringerNature. Please reach out to me for more details.

[2026] A paper with postdoc Songyuan Li and Dr. Shiqiang Wang titled “ProgRouter: Online Progress-Guided Orchestration for Multi-Agent LLM Workflows under Quality-Cost Tradeoffs” is accepted to appear in the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2026.

[2026] Our paper “HASA: Subnet Allocation for Compute-Constrained Model-Heterogeneous Federated Learning” won the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE EDGE 2026 (IEEE World Congress on SERVICES), Sydney, Australia.

[2026] A joint paper with Prof. Chen Wang (HUST) titled “Breaking the Boundary Barrier: Robust Model Fingerprinting via Unlearnable Examples in Model-Parameter Space” is accepted in ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2026.

[2026] Our paper “FedORA: Federated Objective-Resolved Adaptation for Non-Stationary Environments” is accepted in ACM EdgeSys @ MobiSys 2026, Cambridge, UK.

[2026] Two papers accepted in IEEE ICC 2026: “FairMoE-FL: A Communication-Efficient and Fair Federated Mixture-of-Experts Framework” and “R-CASH: Receiver-assisted Class-aware AQM via in-Switch Hysteresis Control for Data Center Networks”.

[2026] Our paper “Federated, Causal-aware Audio Transformer for Cross-site Infant-cry Paralinguistic Classification” is accepted in IEEE ICASSP 2026, Barcelona, Spain.

[Feb-2026] Gave an invited talk on “Advancing Decentralised AI: Towards Scalable, Adaptive, Client-Centric Learning Systems” at the School of Computer Science, University of Exeter.

[Nov-2025] Invited speaker at the Data Intelligence and Architecture Summit, Warsaw, Poland.

[Oct-2025] Invited talks on “Advancing Decentralised AI” at Nanjing University, Central China Normal University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China.

[2025] Awarded UKRI Innovate UK CyberASAP (Phase 1 and Phase 2) funding for Fed-IDS: Decentralised Threat Intelligence and Orchestration, and UKRI ICURe Discover funding for KStore.

[2025] A paper with postdoc Qilei Li titled “Discovering Latent Knowledge Prototypes for Heterogeneous Federated Learning” is accepted in European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), 2025.

[Aug-2025] Gave an invited talk at the British University in Egypt (BUE), Cairo.

[Jun-2025] Gave invited talks at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, and the University of Barcelona, Spain.

[Jun-2025] Co-presented a tutorial on “Advancing Federated Learning in Practice: From Theory to Real-World Edge Applications” at IEEE ICMLCN 2025, Barcelona, Spain.

[Jan-2025] Gave an invited talk on “Efficient and Reliable Systems for Machine Learning at Scale” at the Huawei European Workshop of Trustworthy Technology and Engineering, Grenoble, France.

[22-May-2025] A joint paper with Prof. Chen Wang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) titled “Prototype Surgery: Tailoring Neural Prototypes via Soft Labels for Efficient Machine Unlearning”, is accepted in International ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS), 2025.

[15-May-2025] A joint paper with Prof. Chen Wang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) titled “From Expansion to Retraction: Long-tailed Machine Unlearning via Boundary Manipulation”, is accepted in International ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2025.

[1-Apr-2025] A paper titled “Hierarchical Knowledge Structuring for Effective Federated Learning in Heterogeneous Environments", is accepted in IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IEEE IJCNN), 2025.

[2025] A paper titled “Split Fine-Tuning of BERT-Based Music Models in the Edge-Cloud Continuum: An Empirical Analysis", is accepted in IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (IEEE HPCC), 2025.

[25-Jan-2025] A joint paper with Dr. Ali Anwar from University of Minnesota and Prof. Ali Butt from University of Virgina Tech titled “FLStore: Efficient Federated Learning Storage for non-training workloads”, is accepted in International Conference on Machine Learning Systems (MLSys), 2025.

[14-Jan-2025] A joint paper with Prof. Marco Canini, from KAUST titled “Query-Based Knowledge Transfer for Heterogenous Learning Environments”, is accepted in International Conference on Learning Representation (ICLR), 2025.

[1-Jun-2024] Invited as a Plenary Panel Member to the 24th IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security (IEEE QRS), Cambridge 1-5 Jul, 2024. [Conference Page] [Slides]

[20-May-2024] A joint paper with Prof. Mingliang Gao, from Shandong University of Technology titled “Cross-Modality Interaction Network for Medical Image Fusion”, is accepted in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 2024.

[15-May-2024] A joint paper with Prof. Linlin You, from Sun Yat-Sen University, titled “Exploring Representational Similarity Analysis to Protect Federated Learning from Data Poisoning.”, is accepted the ACM Conference on Web Conference (ACM WWW), 2024.

[1-May-2024] A joint paper with Prof. Yuchao Zhang, from Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, titled “FLAIR: A Fast and Low-Redundancy Failure Recovery Framework for Inter Data Center Network”, is accepted IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2024

[7-Feb-2024] A joint paper with Prof. Ali Anwar, from University of Minnesota Twin-Cities, titled “FLOAT: Federated Learning Optimizations with Automated Tuning", is accepted in ACM Conference on Computer Systems (ACM EuroSys), 2024.

[17-Jan-2024] A paper titled “EMPRN: Reinforcement Learning-based ECN Tuning Using Message Passing Graph Recurrent Networks for Datacenters", is accepted in IEEE Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC), 2024.

[15-Dec-2023] A paper titled "Decentralised Moderation for Interoperable Social Networks: A Conversation-Based Approach for Pleroma and the Fediverse, is accepted in the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (AAAI ICWSM).

[15-Jul-2023] Gave a Keynote at The Intelligent Methods, Systems, and Applications (IMSA) Conference titled “Towards Practical and Efficient Federated Learning” in Cairo, Egypt.

[4-Jul-2023] A joint paper with Prof. Chen Wang, from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, titled “Knowledge Representation of Training Data with Adversarial Examples Supporting Decision Boundary” was accepted to IEEE transactions on Information Forensics and Security (IEEE TIFS), 2023.

[2-Jul-2023] I have presented our work “REFL: Resource-Efficent Federated Learning” at the Fifth UK Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Systems Research Symposium (MobiUK), 2023. [Abstract]

[28-June-2023] Gave a Keynote Speech based on invitation by SAILINGS Lab at Harbin Institute of Technology, China on “Towards Practical and Efficient Federated Learning”. [Event Link]

[24-June-2023] Gave a Keynote Speech at The International Sustainability Conference on “AI and Edge Technologies for Fostering SDGs”. [YouTube Video]

[21-June-2023] Gave a Keynote Speech based on invitation by Super User Network Summit in London, UK on “Big Data, Machine Learning and Federated Learning”. [Event Link]

[25-May-2023] Had a podcast on Systems Research and Federated Learning (inc. our ACM EuroSys work REFL) at the Disseminate: The Computer Science Research Podcast invited by the host Jack Waudby.

[17-May-2023] Gave a talk on Practical and Efficient Federated Learning at the Institute of Communication Systems, University of Surrey invited by Ahmed Elzanaty.

[26-Feb-2023] Our paper “Enhancing TCP via Hysteresis Switching: Theoretical Analysis and Empirical Evaluation", is accepted in IEEE Transactions of Networking (ToN), 2023. [Conference Version]

[10-Feb-2023] Our paper “A Comprehensive Empirical Study of Heterogeneity in Federated Learning", is accepted in IEEE Internet of Things (IoT) Journal, 2023. [ArXiv]

[18-Jan-2023] Our paper “A2FL: Availability-Aware Selection for Machine Learning on Clients with Federated Big Data", is accepted in IEEE ICC, 2023. [Detailed Paper] [Conference Paper] [Slides]