Professor Sakir Sezer is Director of the Centre for Intelligent Computing Networks and Sensing (ICONS) at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, a centre established in 2026 to consolidate research across four complementary themes: accelerated computing paradigms, intelligent networks and mobile broadband technologies, secure and trusted computing, and quantum computing.
He received his Dipl.-Ing. degree in Technical Computer Science from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, in 1994, and his PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Queen's University Belfast (QUB) in 2000.
Professor Sezer's career spans more than three decades across academia, deep-tech entrepreneurship and the global semiconductor industry, at the intersection of academic research and commercial silicon engineering. His work has consistently focused on translating advanced architectural research into deployable technology, addressing critical challenges in accelerated computing, network processing, and the scalability and security of network and AI infrastructure.
He founded Titan IC, a university spin-out established to commercialise the high-performance regular-expression processing technology developed within his research group. Under his leadership, the company grew from a research prototype to a supplier of production silicon IP to leading Tier-1 semiconductor and cybersecurity companies in Silicon Valley, culminating in its acquisition by NVIDIA in 2020. The company's flagship technology, the Titan IC Regular eXpression Processor (RXP), remains one of the most significant contributions to the field of hardware-accelerated content inspection.
Following the acquisition, Professor Sezer spent more than five years at NVIDIA as a Principal Architect within the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, contributing to next-generation accelerated computing and networking for hyperscale AI data centres.
Prior to joining Khalifa University, his academic career was based at Queen's University Belfast, where he held a Chair in Secure Communication Technologies and co-founded the Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) and the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT). Over this period, he led and contributed to numerous EU-funded and UK national research consortia, and supervised a substantial cohort of doctoral researchers, many of whom now hold positions in industry and academia internationally.
Professor Sezer has secured research funding in excess of $40 million as Principal Investigator and $150 million as Co-Investigator across UK, EU and industry programmes, and contributed two 4-star-rated impact case studies to REF2021. He has authored over 260 papers and holds four patents. His contributions have been recognised through a number of awards, including the InvestNI Enterprise Fellowship and the Enterprise Ireland and InterTradeIreland Innovation and Enterprise Awards.
His research interests include domain-specific and neuromorphic computing architectures for accelerated AI and network workloads, SoC and RISC-V processor design, high-performance content processing, hardware security, and privacy-preserving trusted and confidential computing.
At Khalifa University, his agenda centres on building ICONS into an internationally recognised centre of excellence in intelligent computing, bridging fundamental architectural research with the semiconductor and AI infrastructure priorities of the United Arab Emirates.
