Prabal Datta Barua

Professor Dr. Prabal Datta Barua is an award-winning Australian Artificial Intelligence researcher, author, educator, entrepreneur, and highly successful businessman. He has been the CEO and Director of Cogninet Australia for more than a decade (since 2012). He has been serving as the Academic Dean of the Australian International Institute of Higher Education since 2022.

He graduated with a Doctor of Engineering from Kumamoto University, Japan, having completed the doctorate program in the Department of Advanced Industrial Science, administered by the Graduate School of Science and Technology.

In 2025, Prof. Prabal, was awarded the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Research Grant valued at AUD $551,982. The project aimed to develop a new artificial intelligence tool for speech emotion recognition, focusing on detecting subtle emotional variations in human speech.

As of September 2025, according to the academic ranking platform TopSciNet, Prof. Prabal achieved a global ranking of approximately 93,000, which places him in the top 2% of researchers worldwide.

Prof. Prabal was awarded the prestigious UniSQ Alumni Award for Excellence in Research (2023) by the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ), where he is a Professor and PhD supervisor (A.I in Healthcare). He has secured over AUD$3 million in government and industry research grants for conducting cutting-edge research in applying Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) in health informatics, education analytics and ICT for business transformation. As CEO of Cogninet Australia, Prof. Prabal and his team are working on several revolutionary medical projects using A.I.

Prof. Prabal has distinguished himself through his professional, academic, and community service. He is a highly successful business entrepreneur who has built several successful ICT companies that employ over 200 staff. He is a member of the ICT Industry Advisory Board at UniSQ; and a member of the ICT Programs Leadership & Governance Committee at UniSQ. Through his companies, he has been an essential industry partner for competitive research grants and has also directly awarded grants to UniSQ research teams and provided scholarships for UniSQ research students.

Prof. Prabal has built a strong research profile with over 200 publications, which have been cited more than 8,300 times and have an h-index score of 44, and an i10-index of 132 (as of June 2026). He is a Faculty and PhD Research supervisor at the University of Southern Queensland (Australia), the University of New England (Australia), and Taylor’s University (Malaysia). He is a Visiting Professor at SRM University of Science and Technology, India. He is also an Honorary Professional/Industry Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Prof. Prabal is a professional member of the IEEE Computer Society, the Australian Computer Society, The CEO Institute and the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is actively involved in volunteer work for the Australian Red Cross and the St Vincent Paul De Society. He is also a Justice of Peace for the NSW Department of Communities and Justice.