Babak Akhgar Is Professor of Informatics, Co-Founder and Director of CENTRIC (Centre Of

Babak Akhgar

Babak Akhgar is Professor of Informatics, co-founder and Director of CENTRIC (Centre of excellence in terrorism, resilience, intelligence and organized crime research) at Sheffield Hallam University and Fellow of the British Computer Society. Prof Akhgar graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in Software Engineering. Afterwards he gained considerable commercial experience as a Strategy Analyst and Methodology Director for several companies. He consolidated this experience by obtaining a Masters degree (with distinction) in Information Systems in Management and a PhD in Strategic Information Systems from Sheffield Hallam University,

He has more than 120 publications in international journals and conferences on information systems with specific focus on knowledge management (KM) within security domain. He has successfully supervised 12 PhD students. He is member of editorial boards of a number of international Journals, Chair and programme committee member of several international conferences. He has extensive and hands on experience in development, management and execution of KM and Intelligence Management projects in large international security initiatives (e.g. Application of social media in crisis management , intelligence based combating of terrorism and organised crime, Gun crime, cyber security, Big Data and cross cultural ideology polarisation) with multi million Euros budgets. In addition to this he is currently the technical lead of 3 EU Security projects; "Courage" on Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism and "Athena project" on Application of social media and mobile devices in crisis management and "Tensor" on identification of terrorist generated content. Prof Akhgar is founder of CENTRIC OSINT Hub, which provides law enforcement agencies with state of art capabilities to conduct wide range of open source based investigation from Organised Crime network to Counter Terrorism. CENTRIC OSINT HUB is used by wide range of LEAs in UK. He has co-edited a book on Intelligence management (Knowledge Driven frameworks for combating Terrorism and Organised crime). His recent books are titled Strategic Intelligence Management (National Security Imperatives and Information and Communications Technologies) Emerging Trends in ICT Security, Application of Big Data for National Security and Application of OSINT for investigation. Prof Akhgar was Trustee of Police National Legal Database (PNLD) for 2 years. In 2016 Prof Akhgar was chairman of Police Strategy forum. Prof Akhgar is member of academic advisory board of SAS UK and Board member of European Organisation for Security (EOS).