Congratulations to PhD student Qusai Khaled, supervised by Prof. Uzay Kaymak. His research is carried out within the ILLUSTRE lab, where innovative work at the intersection of AI and fuzzy systems is being advanced. At the IFSA-NAFIPS 2025 congress in Alberta, Canada, Qusai received the Outstanding Paper Award for his contribution “Explainable Fuzzy GNNs for Leak Detection in Water Distribution Networks”. The paper introduces a fuzzy set-based explainability framework for Graph Neural Networks — one of the earliest attempts to make GNN decisions interpretable. While applied to leak detection, the method has broader relevance for node classification and localization challenges. The paper is available to read here.
