Dr. Morteza Zihayat is a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Human-Centered AI and Associate Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science. He also holds appointments as Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo (Management Sciences) and IBM Faculty Fellow at IBM Centre for Advanced Studies. He received his PhD in Computer Science from York University (2011-2016), where he received the Best PhD Thesis Award, and previously held positions as Associate Professor and Assistant Professor at TMU’s Ted Rogers School of Management (2017-2025), Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (2016-2017), and Research Fellow at IBM Canada (2014-2016). His research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning, with emphasis on representation learning, ranking and retrieval models, graph-based learning, fairness and responsible AI, and large-scale data-driven systems for real-world applications.