Rate My Professor Abdul Sadka

Professor Abdul Sadka is Professor of Visual Media Technologies and founding Director of the Sir Peter Rigby Digital Futures Institute within the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Aston University, a position he assumed in September 2023. A Chartered Computer & Communications Engineer (CEng) with nearly 30 years of research leadership and business engagement, he is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and British Computer Society (BCS). Prior to Aston, Professor Sadka held senior roles at Brunel University London, including Director of the Institute of Digital Futures (2020–2023), Lead Academic of the Brunel Fellowship Academy reporting to the Provost (2022–2023), founding Director of the Brunel Digital Science & Technology Hub (2018–2020), Director of the Centre for Media Communications Research (2012–2018), and Head of Electronic & Computer Engineering and Digital Media (2006–2012). He chaired the Government-supported West London FE-HE partnership Group representing seven universities and six further education colleges for post-COVID skills transfer in digital industries (2020–2023) and served on the Steering Board of the NEM technology platform, influencing the European strategic research agenda in networked media.

Professor Sadka's research focuses on AI-enabled visual media technologies, including synthetic data generation for medical image applications, real 3D object teleportation for immersive XR scene rendering, high-accuracy digital twins for telemedicine, image and video processing, multimodal data analytics, digital health, smart and autonomous systems, and networked media. He has authored over 300 papers in refereed journals and conferences, four books—such as the seminal "Compressed Video Communications" (2002)—and holds three patents. Key recent publications include "Auditing Demographic Bias in Mistral: An Open-Source LLM’s Diagnostic Performance on the MedQA Benchmark" with Hosameldin Ahmed (2026, IEEE Access), "An integrated framework for the interaction and 3D visualization of cultural heritage" with A. Belhi et al. (2024, Multimedia Tools and Applications), and "A Critical Review of Deep Learning-Based Multi-Sensor Fusion Techniques" with B. Marsh and H. Bahai (2022, Sensors). As Principal Investigator, he has attracted over £15 million in research funding, supervised more than 50 research assistants and PhD students to completion, and developed AI solutions for medical imaging diagnostics like COVID-19, lung cancer, COPD, and pneumonia detection. His contributions align with UN Sustainable Development Goals in health, innovation, and sustainable cities.