Research Leader

Prof Sattar is founding Director of the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems (IIIS), a research centre of excellence at Griffith University established in 2003.  He is  a Research Leader at NICTA Queensland Laboratory since June 2005, and also held the Associate Director of Education portfolio at the Queensland Laboratory from October 2006-June 2008. He has been an academic staff member at Griffith University since February 1992 as a lecturer (1992-95), senior lecturer (1996-99), and professor (2000-present) within the School of Information and Communication Technology.  Prior to his career at Griffith University, he  was a lecturer in Physics in Rajasthan, India (1980-82), research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India (1982-85), the University of Waterloo, Canada (1985-87), and the University of Alberta, Canada (1987-1991).

He holds a BSc (Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics) and an MSc (Physics) from the University of Rajasthan, India, an MPhil in Computer and Systems Sciences from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and an MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a PhD in Computer Science (with specialization in Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Alberta, Canada.  His current research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, constraint satisfaction, rational agents, propositional Satisfiability, temporal reasoning, temporal databases, and bioinformatics. He has supervised 17 successful completions of PhD graduates, and published over 100 technical papers in refereed conferences and journals in the field. His research team has won three major international awards in recent years (the gold medals for the SAT 2005 and SAT 2007 competitions in the random satisfiable category and an IJCAI 2007 distinguished paper award).

He has won several awards starting from the national scholarships during  his studies in India, a Commonwealth scholarship in Canada (1985-1990), to a number of research grants. The main grants include ARC large and Discovery grants (worth approximately $1.5M). He was a principal researcher in the winning bid for the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) for Smart Internet (funding of over $50M for 7 years 2000-2007), and one of the  four founding research leaders for NICTA Queensland Laboratory’s SAFE project ($3.7M for 2005-2008), Smart Applications For Emergencies (SAFE). He led the successful bid for the establishment of IIIS (2003-2007), and its renewal for 2008-2011 (funding approx $300,000 per year).

He is a life time member of AAAI, and a professional member of the ACM.  He has been playing leading roles in organizations of several national and international conferences for the last 20 years.