Muhammad Abulaish is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi, India. With more than 27 years of experience in academia, research, and academic administration, he has established a strong interdisciplinary research profile in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and Network Analytics. Since joining SAU in 2016, he has held several academic leadership positions, including Chairperson of the Department of Computer Science (2016–2018 and 2021–2023), Director (Admissions and Examinations), and Acting Registrar (2022–2024).
Prior to joining SAU, he served for over eighteen years at Jamia Millia Islamia (A Central University), New Delhi, where he held various academic and administrative responsibilities, including Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science. He also worked for more than two years at the Centre of Excellence in Information Assurance, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he led the Internet Surveillance and Forensics Research Group.
He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 2007. He is the founder of the Laboratory for Data Science and Analytics (LDSA) at SAU, an interdisciplinary research laboratory focused on data-intensive approaches for addressing real-world societal and industrial challenges.
His research interests broadly span Data Science and Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and Explainable Text and Social Media Analytics. His work focuses on the development of intelligent and data-driven methodologies for analyzing large-scale and complex information systems, with applications to social media analytics, sentiment and emotion analysis, health informatics, and AI-driven social cybersecurity and misinformation detection.
He has authored more than 163 research publications in leading international journals, conference proceedings, and edited volumes, including multiple papers published in IEEE and ACM Transactions. His research has appeared in several prominent venues in data mining, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and network science.
He currently serves as Associate Editor of two leading international journals in his research domain: Social Network Analysis and Mining (Springer) and Online Social Networks and Media (Elsevier). He was also appointed to the Distinguished Review Board of ACM Transactions on the Web for the term 2022–2024. He has served multiple times as a Senior Program Committee Member of ACM CIKM (2023–2025), one of the premier international conferences in the areas of information retrieval, knowledge management, data mining, and database systems. In addition, he regularly contributes to the program committees of several internationally reputed conferences, including SDM, CIKM, IJCAI-ECAI, PAKDD, ASONAM, and WI-IAT. He has also served in various organizational roles, including Publicity Co-Chair for WI’19 and WI’20, and Workshop Co-Chair for ASONAM’20.
He is a Senior Member of IEEE, ACM, and CSI, and a Life Member of ISTE, IETE, and ISCA.
Khalid Al-Rowaily, Muhammad Abulaish, Nur Al-Hasan Haldar, and Majed Al-Rubaiana, BiSAL – A bilingual sentiment analysis lexicon to analyze Dark Web forums for cyber security, Digital Investigation – The International Journal of Digital Forensics & Incident Response, Vol. 12, Elsevier, pp. 53-62, 2015.
Muhammad Abulaish and Sajid Y. Bhat, Classifier Ensembles using Structural Features for Spammer Detection in Online Social Networks, Foundations of Computing and Decision Sciences, Vol. 40, Issue 2, Poznan University of Technology, Poland, pp. 89-105, 2015.
Sajid Y. Bhat and Muhammad Abulaish, OCMiner: A Density-Based Overlapping Community Detection Method for Social Networks, Intelligent Data Analysis, Vol. 19, Issue 4, IOS Press, Netherland, pp. 1-31, 2015.
Tarique Anwar and Muhammad Abulaish, Ranking Radically Influential Web Forum Users, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Vol. 10, Issue 6, pp. 1289-1298, 2015.
Muhammad Abulaish and Sajid Y. Bhat, A Density-Based Approach to Detect Community Evolutionary Events in Online Social Networks, F. Can et al. (Eds.), State of the Art Applications of Social Network Analysis, Springer, ISBN: 978-3-319-05911-2, pp. 189-208, 2014.
Tarique Anwar and Muhammad Abulaish, A Social Graph Based Text Mining Framework for Chat Log Investigation, Digital Investigation – The International Journal of Digital Forensics & Incident Response, Vol. 11, Issue 4, Elsevier, pp. 349-362, 2014.
Sajid Y. Bhat and Muhammad Abulaish, HOCTracker: Tracking the Evolution of Hierarchical and Overlapping Communities in Dynamic Social Networks, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol.27,Issue 4, pp. 1019-1032, 2014.
Tarique Anwar and Muhammad Abulaish, Namesake Alias Mining on the Web and its Role Towards Suspect Tracking, Information Sciences, Vol. 276, Elsevier, pp. 123-145, 2014.
Sajid Y. Bhat, Muhammad Abulaish, and Abdulrahman A. Mirza, Spammer Classification using Ensemble Methods over Structural Social Network Features, In Proceedings of the 14th IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’14), Warsaw, Poland, pp. 454-458, Aug. 11-14, 2014.
Faraz Ahmed and Muhammad Abulaish, A Generic Statistical Approach for Spam Detection in Online Social Networks, Computer Communications, 36(10-11), Elsevier, pp. 1120-1129, June 2013.
Sajid Y. Bhat and Muhammad Abulaish, Analysis and Mining of Online Social Networks – Emerging Trends and Challenges, WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 3(6), John Wiley and Sons, pp. 408-444, Nov/Dec 2013.
Sajid Y. Bhat and Muhammad Abulaish, Community-Based Features for Identifying Spammers in Online Social Networks, In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM’13), Niagara Falls, Canada, ACM, pp. 100-107, Aug. 25-28,2013.
Faraz Ahmad and Muhammad Abulaish, Identification of Sybil Communities Generating Context-Aware Spam on Online Social Networks, In Proceedings of the 15th Asia-Pacific Web Conference (APWeb’13), Sydney, Australia, pp. 268-279, April 4-6, 2013.
Tarique Anwar and Muhammad Abulaish, Modeling a Web Forum Ecosystem into an Enriched Social Graph, Martin Atzmueller, Alvin Chin, Denis Helic, and Andreas Hotho (Eds.), Ubiquitous Social Media Analysis, Springer, ISBN: 978-3-642-45391, pp. 152-152, 2013.
Muhammad Abulaish and Jahiruddin, Web-Content Mining for Learning Generic Relations and their Associations from Textual Biological Data, Mourad Elloumi and Albert Y. Zomaya (Eds.), Biological Knowledge Discovery Handbook: Preprocessing, Mining and Post-Processing of Biological Data, John Wiley & Sons Inc., New Jersey, ISBN: 9781118132739, pp. 919-942, 2013.
Faraz Ahmad and Muhammad Abulaish, An MCL-Based Approach for Spam Profile Detection in Online Social Networks, In Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (IEEE-TrustCom), Liverpool, UK, pp. 602-608, June 25-27, 2012.
Tarique Anwar and Muhammad Abulaish, An MCL-Based Text Mining Approach for Namesake Disambiguation on the Web, In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’12), Macau, pp. 40-44, Dec. 4-7, 2012.
Tarique Anwar and Muhammad Abulaish, Identifying Cliques in Dark Web Forums – An Agglomerative Clustering Approach, In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI’12), Washington DC, USA, pp. 171-174, June 11-14, 2012.
Tarique Anwar and Muhammad Abulaish, Mining an Enriched Social Graph to Model Cross-Thread Community Interactions and Interests, In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Modeling Social Media (MSM’12): Collective Intelligence in Social Media – Co-located with the 23rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Milwaukee, WI, USA, ACM, pp. 35-38, June 25-28, 2012.
Sajid Y. Bhat and Muhammad Abulaish, OCTracker: A Density-Based Framework for Tracking the Evolution of Overlapping Communities in OSNs, In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM’12), Istanbul, Turkey, August 26-29, 2012.
Tarique Anwar, Muhammad Abulaish and Khaled S. Alghathbar, Web Content Mining for Alias Identification: A first step towards suspect tracking, In Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI’11), Beijing, China, pp. 195-197, 2011.
Muhammad Abulaish, Tanvir Ahmad, Jahiruddin and Mohammed N. Doja, Opinion-Based Imprecise Query Answering, In Proceedings of the 14th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD’10), Hyderabad, India, LNAI-6119, Part-II, Springer-Verlag, pp. 238-248, June 21-24, 2010.
Muhammad Abulaish, Jahiruddin and Lipika Dey, Mining Biological Interactions from Biomedical Texts for Efficient Query Answering, Jake Y. Chen & Stefano Lonardi (Eds.), Biological Data Mining, Chapman & Hall/CRC Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Series, Taylor and Francis Group Publisher, ISBN: 9781420086843, pp. 485-527, 2009.
Lipika Dey and Muhammad Abulaish, A Fuzzy Ontology-Based Text Mining System for Knowledge Acquisition, Ontology Enhancement and Query Answering from Bio-Medical Texts, Gary B. Fogel, David W. Corne and Yi Pan (Eds.), Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics, IEEE Press Series on Computational Intelligence, Wiley/ IEEE Inc., ISBN-9780470105269, pp.297-339, 2008.
Muhammad Abulaish and Lipika Dey, Biological Relation Extraction and Query Answering from Medline Abstracts using Ontology-based Text Mining, Data and Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 61, Issue 2, Elsevier, pp. 228-262, 2007.