Celestine Iwendi, PhD, SMIEEE, FHEA, is a professor of artificial intelligence and the head of the Centre of Intelligence of Things (CIoTh) at the University of Bolton. A Senior Member of the IEEE, his academic background is associated with Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Uppsala University, and the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses on the application of artificial intelligence to the Internet of Things (IoT), network security, privacy-preserving data sanitization and methods for medical and IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) applications, and sustainable AI for socio-technical systems.^[1,2]

Iwendi has held academic and research appointments in UK and international institutions and is listed as Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Head of the Centre of Intelligence of Things at the University of Bolton (CIoTh). He has served in leadership roles within professional societies, including an appointment as Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Election Committee (2024) and selection as an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2025–2026.^[4,5]

Iwendi's published research spans applied artificial intelligence, IoT/IoMT security, privacy-preserving text sanitization for medical data, and machine learning applications in healthcare and communications.^[6,7,8] Major themes in his research include semantic sanitization frameworks for privacy-preserving data sanitization of free-text clinical records and unstructured medical datasets. His work also focuses on AI and machine learning methods for IoT and IoMT security, including intrusion detection and energy-efficient edge and offloading strategies for mobile edge computing. Additionally, his research addresses machine learning for healthcare applications, such as diet recommendation systems and disease-prediction models within IoMT ecosystems, as well as the detection of online harms, such as cyberbullying, using deep learning methods.

In September 2020, Celestine Iwendi, Syed Atif Moqurrab, Adeel Anjum, Sangeen Khan, Senthilkumar Mohan, and Gautam Srivastava published "N-Sanitization: A semantic privacy-preserving framework for unstructured medical datasets" in Computer Communications. That same year, Joseph Henry Anajemba, Tang Yue, Celestine Iwendi, Mamdouh Alenezi, and Mohit Mittal published "Optimal Cooperative Offloading Scheme for Energy Efficient Multi-Access Edge Computation" in IEEE Access. On 31 August 2021, Celestine Iwendi, Saif Ur Rehman, Abdul Rehman Javed, Suleman Khan, and Gautam Srivastava authored "Sustainable Security for the Internet of Things Using Artificial Intelligence Architectures", appearing in ACM Transactions on Internet Technology. On 26 July 2022, Shynu Padinjappurathu Gopalan, Chiranji Lal Chowdhary, Celestine Iwendi, Muhammad Awais Farid, and Lakshmana Kumar Ramasamy published "An Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Disease Prediction in Modern Healthcare Systems" in Sensors.

A Senior Member of the IEEE, he was appointed Election Committee Chair for the IEEE Computer Society in 2024. He was also selected as an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for the 2025–2026 term. Additionally, he is a recipient of the Herbert Simon Award for Outstanding Contribution in the International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making (IJITDM).