Rami AL-HAJJ received a BS degree in applied mathematics and a DEA (Diplome d’Etude Approfondie) degree in mathematical modeling and intensive computation from the Lebanese University, Beirut, in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and a Ph.D. in signal and image processing from Télécom ParisTech, France, in 2007. He joined Business Machines Corporation in Beirut from 2000 to 2004, then the Lebanese International University from 2007 to 2012. Currently, he is an associate professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the American University of Middle East – Kuwait. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition, optimization, and evolutionary computation. He was one of the team that won the Competition on Arabic handwritten word recognition in ICDAR 2005 Seoul-Korea. He is currently an IEEE — Intelligent Computation Community member