Narasimha Rao Vajjhala

Narasimha Rao Vajjhala is Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), and a Senior Member of both the ACM and the IEEE. Over more than eighteen years he has taught and led programmes across the Western Balkans, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the United Kingdom — building a career defined by the ability to bridge the gap between technology and the organisations and societies that depend on it.

He holds a Doctorate in Management, with a specialization in Information Systems and Technology, from the University of Phoenix (USA), a Master of Business Administration in Information Systems Management from the Institut Universitaire Kurt Bösch (Switzerland), a Master of Computer Applications from Osmania University (India), and a Postgraduate Certificate in Information Technology from the University of Liverpool (United Kingdom). Before joining AUBG he served as Associate Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at the University of New York Tirana, Albania. In March 2026 he was elected to that university’s Permanent Commission for Awarding the Scientific Degree “Doctor” (CASD) for the 2026–2028 mandate. At AUBG he serves in 2026–2027 on the Faculty Council and the Habilitation Screening Committee for the university’s habilitation procedures for the academic position of Associate Professor.

His research spans machine learning, cybersecurity, healthcare informatics, project management, technology acceptance, and the adoption of technology in transition economies. His work is indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science (SSCI, SCIE and ESCI), including Scopus Q1 journals such as Systems and Sustainability, alongside edited books with CRC Press/Routledge and IGI Global and an authored monograph. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Risk and Contingency Management, an Associate Editor of Information Security Journal: A Global Perspective (Taylor & Francis), serves on the editorial boards of several Scopus-indexed journals, and reviews for Springer Nature and MDPI journals, among them Scientific Reports and the International Journal of Speech Technology. He has also served on the scientific and technical committees of international conferences, among them WorldCIST'26, CSTE 2026 and ICAISF 2026, chaired the Intelligent Systems session at the 2026 IEEE World Conference on Applied Intelligence and Computing (AIC 2026), and reviews for the ACM Student Research Competition track of the 58th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS 2027). He is one of the Conference Chairs of the 4th International Conference on Educational Digitalization and Computer Science in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (EDCS 2027), to be held in Macao in April 2027. In September 2026 he gave the keynote address “Orchestrating Human-AI Synergy in Educational Ecosystems: From Transparent Collaboration to Sustainable Innovation” at the 6th International Conference on Novel & Intelligent Digital Systems (NiDS 2026), University of West Attica, Athens, and in October 2026 he co-moderated, with Nikos Fatouros, a panel at AUBG on AI in real organisations with senior representatives of the World Bank Group, among them its Director and Chief Technology Officer.

A civil-security strand runs through the research and the public work. It includes applied face recognition for the identification of missing persons, correspondence analysis of open global terrorism data, user and entity behavioural analytics for threat detection, insider-threat detection, and a systematic review of deepfake generation that found almost no consent or provenance safeguards in the literature — gathered on the cybersecurity synthesis page, and extended through edited volumes on AI-enabled threat intelligence and cyber risk assessment and on cybersecurity for decision makers. Alongside it runs a strand on AI, democracy and civic resilience: he co-edited, with Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob, AI and the Future of Democracy: Building Resilient and Inclusive Societies (Chapman & Hall/CRC, indexed in Scopus), and was Principal Investigator of DemPro, the civic-participation platform built at AUBG’s Center for Information, Democracy and Citizenship. In May 2025 he spoke on “AI and disinformation: The challenge of LLM poisoning” at the Pravda Disinformation Network roundtable in Sofia, convened by the Disinformation Observatory, AUBG’s Center for Information, Democracy and Citizenship, Sensika Technologies and the Atlantic Association of Officers in the Reserve, and joined the closing roundtable on countermeasures and policy recommendations. He takes part in three pan-European research networks funded under Horizon Europe as COST Actions: as Albania’s representative on the Management Committee of CA23144 (ESIND), and as a Working Group member of CA22104 (BEiNG-WISE), on the human factors and cybercrime dimensions of next-generation wireless security, and of CA22154 (DAEMON), on machine learning for the design of functional materials.

Alongside his academic work, he is a certified ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Associate Auditor (CQI/IRCA), an External Quality Auditor on EU-funded Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education projects, and an Expert Evaluator for the European Research Executive Agency (REA, Horizon Europe) and the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA, Erasmus+); his Horizon Europe evaluation for a call of the Global Health EDCTP3 Joint Undertaking was completed in October 2026. Also in 2026 he was appointed by the Fundación para el Conocimiento madri+d as an expert evaluator and rapporteur for the RIVCircular Open Call for Interregional Circular Economy Innovation Proposals, a cascade-funding call under the Horizon Europe European Innovation Ecosystems programme, and by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, as coordinator of the EuroHPC Virtual Training Academy (EVITA), as an external independent expert for the evaluation of course proposals submitted to the project’s open calls for modular high-performance computing training material; proposals to the first call are now under review. In October 2026 he was selected as an external expert for a Selection Committee of AgrifoodTECH, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND postdoctoral programme in agri-food technology coordinated by the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena. In the same month he was admitted to the reserve list of the European Data Protection Board’s Support Pool of Experts for technical expertise in new technologies and information security; experts on the list work on a project basis, and he is not an EDPB employee and has not been offered a contract. He was also included, as an academic expert in the technical and technological sciences, on the List of Experts from which Montenegro’s Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education appoints its panels for the accreditation of study programmes and the reaccreditation of higher-education institutions. He is also registered in the expert database of FIBAA — an ENQA full member listed in the European Quality Assurance Register — for Computer Science and Management, in the EIT Urban Mobility expert database for evaluators and rapporteurs, in the Expert Database of the Research Council of Lithuania, and as an expert of the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, and was selected as an independent expert in cultural heritage for the EIT Culture & Creativity Pool of Experts 2026. In November 2026 he was selected for the pool of experts of INSIGHT, a Horizon Europe project on careers for early-stage researchers, through its Bulgarian partner, the Regional Agency for Entrepreneurship and Innovations – Varna. He holds the PMP, along with the PM² Essentials and PM² Basic certifications in the European Commission’s project-management methodology. He is fluent in English (IELTS General Training overall band 8.0/9.0, CEFR C1).