Omar El-Gayar
Omar El-Gayar
Professor
Department
College of Business & Information Systems
Education
Ph.D., University of Hawaii
M.A., University of Hawaii
M.S., Alexandria University
B.S., Alexandria University
Biography
Omar F. El-Gayar, Ph.D., is an academic leader and scholar working where artificial intelligence, academic quality and computing curriculum standards meet. He is Professor of Information Systems at Dakota State University (DSU), where he has served since 2000.
He is a builder. As DSU's founding Dean of Graduate Studies and Research (2006–2015), he led the creation of the university's first two doctoral programs and four master's programs, established two research centers and the Institutional Review Board, grew graduate enrollment by 229%, and increased self-support tuition revenue by 274%. As Dean of the College of Information Technology at UAE University (2015–2017), he led the college's strategic plan, restructuring, ABET and national reaccreditation, and partnerships with IBM, Dell-EMC, Microsoft and Hitachi.
Today, his leadership is national. He serves on the Executive Committee of ABET's Computing Accreditation Commission and on the CSAB Board, co-chairs the committee developing the first accreditation criteria for AI and machine learning programs, has led eight of his sixteen ABET accreditation visits as team chair, has conducted 24 Higher Learning Commission reviews, and contributes the AI, user-experience and emerging-technologies domains to the ACM/IEEE-CS IT2027 global curriculum guidelines.
His research program "AI for societal benefit" spans explainable and fair AI, large language models and AI agents, digital health, cybersecurity and privacy, and AI for agriculture and climate, published in venues including Decision Support Systems, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, JMIR and ACM TMIS. He has chaired 32 doctoral dissertations and served on 32 more committees; his graduates work at AWS, IBM, Visa, Northeastern University, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He completed Harvard's Institute for Educational Management and Management and Leadership in Education programs.
Contact
Office Location: East Hall
Phone: (605) 256-5165
Email
Website
- Design science research
- Research methods
- Emerging technologies
- AI for societal benefit
- The future of work
- Health informatics
- Smart agriculture
- Cyber security analytics
Select publications:
- Allalen, A., & El-Gayar, O. (2025). Distilled Ensembles and Quantized Prototypical Networks for Adaptive, Edge-Based Weed Classification. AMCIS 2025 Proceedings. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2025/sig_green/sig_green/17
- Bittle, K., & El-Gayar, O. (2025). Generative AI and Academic Integrity in Higher Education: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda. Information, 16(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/info16040296
- El-Gayar, O., Al-Ramahi, M., Wahbeh, A., Elnoshokaty, A., & Nasralah, T. (2025). Mining User Reviews for Key Design Features in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-Based Mobile Mental Health Apps. Telemedicine Journal and E-Health: The Official Journal of the American Telemedicine Association, 31(3), 333–343. https://doi.org/10.1089/tmj.2024.0053
- El-Gayar, O., & Elnoshokaty, A. (2023). Factors and Design Features Influencing the Continued Use of Wearable Devices. Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41666-023-00135-4
- El-Gayar, O., Wahbeh, A., Al-Ramahi, M., & Elnoshokaty, A. (2025, January 7). Highlighting Competency Gaps in Health Informatics Education Using Advanced Text-Embedding Models. Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/109447
- El-Gayar, O., Wahbeh, A., Al-Ramahi, M., Elnoshokaty, A., & Nasralah, T. (2025). Leveraging Large Language Models and In-Context Learning for Construct Identification in Computational Social Science: A Case Study on Wearable Devices. Issues In Information Systems, Article 4.
- Elnoshokaty, A., El-Gayar, O., Wahbeh, A., Al-Ramahi, M., & Nasralah, T. (2026). Highlighting AI Competencies: A Qualitative Analysis Approach Using AI Agents. Proceedings of the 59th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/111996
- Fowler, B., & El-Gayar, O. (2026). Privacy Decision-Making under Constrained Disclosure: IoV Evidence. Journal of Computer Information Systems. https://doi.org/10.1080/08874417.2026.2626410
- Malla, D., & El-Gayar, O. (2026). Enhancing Transparency and Trust in Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Insights and Opportunities. AMCIS 2026 Proceedings. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2026/sig_dsa/sig_dsa/10
- Mutale, W., & El-Gayar, O. (2025). The Impact of Organizational Culture on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Adoption and Performance: A Qualitative Approach. AMCIS 2025 Proceedings. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2025/sig_culture/sig_culture/3
- Naidu, N., & El-Gayar, O. (2025, January 7). A Review of Reasoning in Artificial Agents Using Large Language Models. Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/109007
- Shaheen, A., & El-Gayar, O. (2024). Weed Detection using Lightweight DL models with Transfer Learning & Hyperparameter Optimization. AMCIS 2024 Proceedings. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2024/sig_green/sig_green/7/
- Shakya, B., El-Gayar, O., Kaabi, J., & Mamun Ahmed, K. (2026). Small-Object Detection at the Edge: A Pareto-Efficient Benchmark of Lightweight YOLO Models on UAV and Overhead Datasets. IEEE Access, 14, 528–548. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3648968
- Wahbeh, A., El-Gayar, O., Al-Ramahi, M., Elnoshokaty, A., & Nasralah, T. (2026). Ethical Concerns in AI-Driven Healthcare: A Social Media Discourse Analysis. AMCIS 2026 Proceedings. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2026/sig_odis/sig_odis/4
- Wahbeh, A., El-Gayar, O., Al-Ramahi, M., Nasralah, T., & Elnoshokaty, A. (2026). AutoTheme: A Multi-Agent Framework for Inductive Thematic Analysis with LLMs. Proceedings of the 59th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/111609