Dr. Rim FAIZ

Dr. Rim Faiz is a Full Professor in Business Computing at the Institute of High Business Study (IHEC Carthage) at the University of Carthage since 2007.

She obtained her Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Paris-Dauphine, LAMSADE Lab., in France, since 1996.

She is a program Director of the Master "Big Data in E-Commerce" and the Master "Business Intelligence and Applied Artificial Intelligence". Her remits included recruitment initiatives, improving qualification rates and enhancing student experience.

Pr. Faiz is the Director of the "AI, Big Data and Natural Language Processing" team within LARODEC Laboratory, a specialist research center within the Department of Computer Science. Her research focuses on Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems, Semantic Web and Digital Technologies for Commerce.

Pr. Faiz has published several papers and has served as PC member and reviewer for several international conferences and journals. She has been invited as keynote speaker in several International Conferences and Universities.

Recently, Pr. Faiz has been nominated by the U.S. Ambassy to participate in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) on Higher Education Partnerships which takes place in the United States, February 2023. This project aims to strengthen connections between U.S. and MENA Universities.

Dr. Rim Faiz has been selected to participate in the Idea Lab for Improving Business and Entrepreneurship Education in MENA Countries and the U.S. – Working Forum in Dubai, UAE on July 20-21, 2022.

As an expert in AI, she has been a member of the META – Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey (MENAT) Privacy Expert Group, since 2022.

She is principal investigator for “Digital Technologies for Tourism”, a project that is investigating digital solutions and recommender systems for empowering the tourism sector to contribute to the economic and social development of Tunisia. The project led to the accomplishment of 3 Ph.D. thesis:

Context-aware approaches for Mobile Search (Dr. Sondess Missaoui, 2018); Integrating Current Context and Social Influence for Improving Recommendation (Dr. Mariem Banbia, 2017); A Hybrid Model for Context-Aware Proactive Recommendation (Dr. Imen Akermi, 2017).

She was also an Investigator and supervisor on 5 MOBIDOC projects (2014-2017), within the PASRI program funded by The European Union. These projects explored different fields of personalized Information Retrieval and Recommendation. Many Ph.D thesis have been realized within the MOBIDOC projects including: "Topic models for recommendation systems" (Dr. Maha Amami); "Personalized Information Retrieval based on Time-Sensitive User Profile" (Dr. Ameni Kacem).

On the other hand, Pr. Faiz was a principal Investigator on “Big data and Social Media” project that led to the accomplishment of 3 Ph.D. thesis: "Leveraging big data for event detection in microblogs" (Dr. Soumaya Cherichi, 2018); " Towards a contextualization of tweets based on an analysis of conversation graphs " (Dr. Rami Belkaroui, 2018); " An approach to estimate influence in complex networks; Application to the social network Twitter " (Dr. Lobna Azaza, 2019).

More recently, Pr. Faiz expanded her research into the emerging field of Legal Artificial Intelligence through a project supervised in the context of the Ph.D. thesis of Dr. Eya Hammami, titled "Legal Texts Representation for Multi-Tasks Based on Intermediate Hidden Layers" (2024). This project addressed the challenges of representing complex legal documents by aggregating intermediate hidden layers from pre-trained language models to improve retrieval, classification, and clustering tasks. Funded by Google Research, this project led to a significant milestone, with Dr. Hammami becoming the first Tunisian researcher in computer science to receive this distinction and one of the first two African awardees in Natural Language Processing in 2021.

In order to internationalize the PhD program in her university, Pr. Faiz contributed to establish a joint supervision program with the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy and the University of Nantes, France. Three Ph.D. students from the University of Tunis (ISG) have taken advantage of this joint supervision process.

To widen her research scope and improve the research reputation of her university, Pr. Faiz established strong industrial relationships with leading individuals and companies including Orange Tunisia, XVISION engineering, Pinhole, and TUNAV.

Since 2005, she has been a committee chair and head of the IHEC Challenge. A pedagogical innovation program for start-ups and business creation. The challenge’s objective is to put into practice the lessons taught by IHEC institution, to promote diversity and synergy between engineering schools and business schools, to develop the partnership between companies and national and international universities and, finally, to bring up business creation entrepreneurial idea among IHEC young graduates.

Until recently, Pr. Faiz is an active member of the CNCI, "National Sectoral Commission for Computer Science” in Tunisia. She was also a Senior Tutor for Research and a member of the national committee to Recruit IT and Computer Science Professors.

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