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Dr Ammar Karkar serves as Principal Adviser for Advanced and Emerging Technologies at the Centre for Educational Design and Innovation (CEDI) in the Academic Division of the University of Otago. His expertise includes the effective and responsible integration of generative AI in higher education, VLSI design and architectures, and agentic AI. Karkar earned his PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Newcastle University in 2016, an MSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Newcastle University in 2012, an MSc in Information, Computer and Network Security from New York Institute of Technology in 2007, and a BSc in Computer Engineering from Mustansiriyah University in 2004.
Before joining the University of Otago, Karkar was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic and Communications Engineering and Director of the IT Research and Development Center at the University of Kufa, Iraq, where he also held positions as Assistant Lecturer, Board Member, and Head of Training Department since 2007. He worked as a Research and Development Engineer at Photon Fire Ltd in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in 2016, and as a Lab Demonstrator at Newcastle University from 2012 to 2016. His research focuses on networks-on-chip, emerging interconnects including surface-wave communication, many-core systems, VLSI design, FPGA programming, e-learning adoption challenges, and IoT applications in healthcare such as wearable monitoring systems for COVID-19 patients. Karkar has published extensively, with key works including 'A survey of emerging interconnects for on-chip efficient multicast and broadcast in many-cores' (IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, 2016), 'Highlighting E-learning Adoption Challenges using data Analysis Techniques: University of Kufa as a Case Study' (Electronic Journal of e-Learning, 2020), 'Hybrid wire-surface wave interconnects for next-generation networks-on-chip' (IET Computers & Digital Techniques, 2013), 'Thermal and performance efficient on-chip surface-wave communication for many-core systems in dark silicon era' (ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, 2022), and 'INTELLIGENT HUMAN RESCUE ROBOT: AN AI-DRIVEN APPROACH WITH FPGA TECHNOLOGY' (Kufa Journal of Engineering, 2026). His publications have garnered over 480 citations, contributing to advancements in engineering fields related to on-chip communication and emerging technologies.