Dr. Rafea served as the Chair of the Computer Science Department and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University. He also served as a Visiting Professor at San Diego State University and National University in the United States. Dr. Rafea has led many projects aiming at using Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems Technologies for the development of the Agriculture sector in Egypt. The first project started in 1989 and was funded by UNDP. The projects main objective was to use Expert System Technology to transfer agricultural research results to the field through extension services in the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture. One of the outputs of this project was the first real expert system in Agriculture to be used in the field, not only in Egypt but also in all developing countries. Dr. Rafea has also been the lead national consultant for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in two projects funded by FAO and the Italian Debt Swap Fund. As the leading national consultant, Dr. Rafea strengthened the linkage between research and extension and helped build a Rural and Agricultural Development Communication Network using Information and Communication Technology. Dr.Rafea was the principal investigator of several projects for developing Intelligent Systems and Machine Translation in collaboration with European and American Universities. He is currently a member in the Center of Excellence on Data Mining and Computer Modeling, sponsored by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. Dr. Rafea holds a B.Sc. in electronics and communication engineering from the Faculty of Engineering and a graduate diploma in Computer Science from theInstitute of Statistical Studies and Research, Cairo University. He received another graduate diploma and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France in 1980.  

Data, Text and We Mining, Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Based System Development.