Abdalkarim Awad is an Assistant Professor in the department of electrical and computer Engineering, Birzeit University. He was working as an Assistant Professor in the department of computer science 7 at the University of Erlangen from 2012 to 2016. Dr. Awad received his Bachelor in Electrical Engineering and M.Sc. in Scientific Computing degree from Birzeit University in 1999 and 2002, respectively. In 2006, he joined the networking group at the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Erlangen, Germany supported by a DAAD scholarship. In 2009, he completed his Ph.D. at the school of engineering. In 2011, he was Research Associate in the Integrated Communication Systems Group at Faculty of Computer Science and Automation, Ilmenau University of Technology. Dr. Awad coordinated and participated in several projects sponsored from different entities. His current research interests are focused on communication-enabled smart systems as well as security and privacy issues in smart systems. His research interests include also software defined networking, internet of things, sensor networks and peer-to-peer systems.