Dr. Belkacem Chikhaoui
Talk Title
Beyond Text: The Rise of Multimodal AI in Understanding Reality
Abstract
Artificial intelligence has made remarkable progress with text-based models, yet real-world intelligence is inherently multimodal, combining language, vision, signals, and contextual data. This keynote explores the shift toward multimodal AI systems capable of integrating diverse data sources to achieve a deeper and more holistic understanding of complex environments.
We discuss recent advances in multimodal representation learning, cross-modal fusion, and foundation models, while highlighting key limitations related to temporal dynamics, uncertainty, and causality. Building on this, the talk presents emerging approaches that incorporate causal reasoning and explainability into multimodal frameworks to enable more robust and trustworthy decision-making.
Through applications in digital health, cognitive systems, and education, we illustrate how multimodal AI moves beyond pattern recognition toward meaningful interpretation. The keynote concludes with a vision for next-generation AI systems that bridge perception and reasoning to better understand real-world complexity.
Biography
Dr. Belkacem Chikhaoui is a Full Professor of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at TELUQ University (Montreal, Canada), where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Multimodal Data Mining and serves as Scientific Director of the Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is also a Lab Director at CRIUGM and an Adjunct Professor at University of Sherbrooke. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same institution in 2013 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, where he advanced AI-driven healthcare applications.
His research has led to impactful contributions in digital health and smart systems, including predictive modeling of dementia-related behaviors, early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, contactless monitoring technologies, and AI-driven educational analytics for student success prediction. He has also contributed to the design of ethical and trustworthy AI frameworks for real-world deployment.
Dr. Chikhaoui's work lies at the intersection of multimodal AI, causal learning, and next-generation intelligent systems. His research spans machine learning, generative AI, explainable AI, natural language processing, biomedical engineering, and quantum machine learning. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals and international conferences.