Dr Ismail Ali serves as a Lecturer at the Capability Systems Centre within the School of Systems and Computing at UNSW Canberra, University of New South Wales. He obtained his undergraduate degree from the Faculty of Computer and Information at Zagazig University, Egypt, in 2010. Subsequently, he earned a Master by Research in computer science from the School of Engineering and Information Technology at UNSW Canberra in 2016, followed by a PhD in computer science from the same institution in 2020. His Master's thesis was awarded the Stephen Fester Prize for the Most Outstanding Thesis on an Information Technology Related Topic in 2016, and his PhD thesis received the same prize in 2020, along with the Dean's Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis—UNSW Canberra.

Ali's research specializations include continuous and combinatorial optimization, evolutionary algorithms, product capability provision, job scheduling, cyber security, IoT, simulation-based optimization techniques, production system and supply network engineering, scheduling problems, and operations research. Following his PhD, he joined the Capability Systems Centre as a research associate in 2020 and advanced to his current lecturing role. His contributions apply to defense applications such as mission engineering, swarming robotics, fleet mix problems, and reconfigurable manufacturing systems. Key publications encompass 'Simulation-based multi-objective optimization for mission specific tuning of swarming robots' in Swarm and Evolutionary Computation (2025), 'Advanced mission engineering approach for diverse applications in the defense domain' in Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation (2025), 'Multi-objective-based differential evolution for balancing production cost, diversity and aggregated performance attributes in product family design' in Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal (2024), 'An integrated differential evolution algorithm for reconfigurable manufacturing systems' in Applied Soft Computing (2023), 'A military fleet mix problem for high-valued defense assets: A simulation-based optimization approach' in Expert Systems with Applications (2023), and 'Novel binary differential evolution algorithm for knapsack problems' in Information Sciences (2021). He teaches courses including Simulation (ZEIT8412), Reliability Engineering Fundamentals (ZEIT8031), Reliability Program Management (ZEIT8152), and Reliability Engineering Assurance (ZEIT8039), and supervises PhD students.

Professional Email: ismail.ali@unsw.edu.au