Formal Biography

Founding Director, Center for Informatics and Data Analytics (CIDA)

Assistant Professor of Information Technology

The American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS)

Dr. Latif holds a BSc. in Civil Engineering, a BSc. in Computing and Statistics, a Graduate Diploma in Computing and Informatics, and a PhD in Computing and Robotics from the Nottingham Trent University (NTU) in the United Kingdom (UK). He has worked as an IT faculty member and Department Chair in the Department of Information Technology at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS).

He has worked as an IT specialist in the United Nations World Health Organization (UN WHO), mobile product engineer in Huawei Technologies Ltd., and a research assistant at the Center for Innovation and Technology Exploitation (CITE) in the UK. He has submitted and presented a number of scientific articles in journals and conferences around the world.

In addition to his formal duties, he has supervised numerous capstone projects of the IT students, including winning projects of the City Award of Sulaimani and featured projects on multiple TV programs. He has also voluntarily mentored and led a number of student teams to participate in different activities and competitions, including the top winning teams in the local competition of Microsoft ImagineCup for 2012.

Most recently, he has also voluntarily founded the Center for Informatics and Data Analytics (CIDA), a research, consultancy and training center that aims to support the government, private sector and the civic society, with the use of data science, to make more informative, data-driven decisions on multiple levels.

He has developed and offered courses on creativity and launched Creativity@AUIS: a dream to ignite, promote, and teach creativity; creativity not only as a life skill, but as a way of life. He has also launched Thursday THANK YOUs, a campaign to promote THANK YOUs among coworkers and friends through Facebook. Additionally, he has been an active advocate for entrepreneurship and has served on the judging panel of the first and third Startup Weekend Sulaimani events.

He is also known as a Kurdish Poet, with published poetry booklets, live poetry readings in Kurdish and English, and many lyrics for well-known Kurdish songs. He has led many events and given public speeches, in three languages, including all Graduation Commencement Ceremonies of the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS) so far. He has had many TV interviews on the topics of Robotics, IT, Social Networking, Education, and Creativity.

He is currently an Assistant Professor of Information Technology (IT) and the Founding Director of the Center for Informatics and Data Analytics (CIDA) at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS).