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Dr. Mahdi Abdelguerfi

Founder and Executive Director, Canizaro-Livingston Gulf States Center for Environmental Informatics
Canizaro-Livingston Endowed professor in software and systems development
Professor, Computer Science Department, University of New Orleans

Latest Research and Interests

  • Dr. Abdelguerfi is currently professor of computer science at the University of New Orleans (UNO) and the founder and executive director of the interdisciplinary Canizaro-Livingston Gulf States Center for Environmental Informatics (GulfSCEI - pronounced Gulf Sea), whose primary goal is to assist state, federal agencies and non-government organizations solve environmental problems of the coastal margin of the State of Louisiana as well as other Gulf States.

  • His current research interests include geospatial environmental informatics, geospatial intelligence, big geospatial data mining, and spatio-temporal information systems. Dr. Abdelguerfi’s total federal research funding, as principal investigator, amounts to $9.7M out of which about $6.7M are currently in force. His research has been funded substantially, consistently and without interruption by the U.S. Department of the Navy over the last twenty years, indicating a high-level of satisfaction with, and confidence in, the quality of the research produced and the ability of my research team to meet its contractual deliverables in a timely manner.

  • Dr. Abdelguerfi is the recipient of the 2022 "UNO's Career Research Award." He was awarded the 2003 and 2016 "Alan Berman Annual Research Publication Award" from the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington D.C. for research performed jointly with scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). He received the 2016 UNO's "Competitive Funding Prize" in recognition of outstanding and innovative work in support of UNO's research mission. He was also the recipient of UNO's Early Career Achievement Award for Excellence in Research.

    • Latest Publications

  • Holmberg*, E., Pokhrel*, P., Schmidt*, A., Ioup*, E., Pathak, K., Sloan, S., Niles, K., Ratcliff, J., Flanagin*, M., Simeonov, J., Guetl, C., Abdelguerfi, M., " Accelerating HEC-RAS: A Recurrent Neural Operator for Rapid River Forecasting," The International Conference on Technologies for Marine and Coastal Ecosystems, Spain, October - 2025.
  • Pokhrel*, P., Schmidt*, A. Ferdaus, M., Ioup*, E., Simeonov, J., Abdelguerfi, M., " Multi-source constrained Machine Learning for oceanic parameters forecasting," The International Conference on Technologies for Marine and Coastal Ecosystems, Spain, October - 2025.
  • Schmidt*, A., Pokhrel*, P., Ferdaus, M., Ioup*, E., Abdelguerfi, M., Simeonov, J., "Evaluating Hyperparameter Selection Techniques for the Ratio-Coupled Loss Function," The International Conference on Technologies for Marine and Coastal Ecosystems, Spain, October - 2025.
  • Zoch*, M., Holmberg*, E., Pokhrel*, P., Pathak, K., Sloan, S., Niles, K., Ratcliff, J., Flanagin*, M., Ioup*, E., Guetl, C., Abdelguerfi, M., "Physics-informed neural network surrogate models for river stage prediction,"The Eleventh International Conference on Big Data, Small Data, Linked Data and Open Data, France, May-2025.
  • Alshawi*, R., Ferdaus, M., Abdelguerfi, M., Kendall, N., Pathak, K., Sloan, S., "Imbalance-Aware Culvert-Sewer Defect Segmentation Using an Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - IEEE, 2025, doi: 10.1109/TSMC.2025.3579706.
  • Holmberg*, E, Ioup*, E., Abdelguerfi, M., "Knowledge Graph-Based Multi-Agent Path Planning in Dynamic Environments using WAITR," The 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), Washington D.C., U.S., 2024, doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.19469.
  • Sandner*, E., Schmidt*, A., Pokhrel*, P., Ioup*, E, Dobson, D., Guetl, C., "A Multiple-Location Modeling Scheme for Physics-Regularized Networks: Recurrent Forecasting of Fixed-Location Buoy Observations," The First International Conference on Technologies for Marine and Coastal Ecosystems, Spain, November, 2024.
  • Schmidt*, A., Pokhrel*, P., Ferdaus, M., Abdelguerfi, M., Ioup*, E, Dobson, D., "Physics-Regularized Buoy Forecasts: A Multi-Hyperparameter Approach Using Bounded Random Search," The First International Conference on Technologies for Marine and Coastal Ecosystems, Spain, November, 2024. (Recipient of Research Track Best Paper Award)
    • More Publications

    Active Grants & Contracts

  • HYCOM Surrogate Modeling With Ratio-Coupled Loss Functions and Seamless Enroute IFR Chart Generation from Geospatial Data
    Abdelguerfi, M. (PI)
    Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) - Department of the Navy
    Award: $1,107,716 (approved for funding). Nov. 2025 — Oct. 2030
  • Advancing Ocean Forecasting Through Sparse Identification, Physiscs-Informed Neural Networks, and Wave Modeling Integration
    Ferdaus, M. (PI), Abdelguerfi, M. (Co-PI)
    Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) - Department of the Navy
    Award: $110,236 (approved for funding). Nov. 2025 — Oct. 2026
  • Artificial Intelligence Algorithms to Identify Deficiencies in Flood Control Systems
    Abdelguerfi, M. (PI), Hoque, T. (Co-PI)
    U.S Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)
    Award: $3,750,000 (W912HZ-23-2-004). Jan. 2023 — Jan. 2026
  • Geospatial Intelligence and Pattern Discovery
    Abdelguerfi, M. (PI)
    Office of Naval Research (ONR) - Department of the Navy
    Award: $1,813,141 (N00173-19-S-BA01). Sep. 2020 — Aug. 2026
    • More Grants

    Contact Me

    Email

    mahdi@cs.uno.edu

    Phone

    (504) 280-7107

    Visit Office

    2000 Lakeshore Dr.
    Math Room 300
    New Orleans, LA 70148