Professional career

Hala Neji graduated as a senior Telecommunications Technician from Higher Institute for Technological Studies of Gabes (Tunisia) in 2013. In 2016 she obtained a Network and communication Engineer degree (6-year studies) from the National Engineering School of Gabes at the University of Gabes (Tunisia).

Between 2017 and 2022 she was a PhD student at the Electrical Engineering Doctorate Programme of the Doctoral School of “Sciences, Engineering and Society” from the National School of Engineers of Gabes (ENIG) under the supervision of Adel M. Alimi and Mohamed Ben Halima from the Research Groups in Intelligent Machines (REGIM) Lab of the University of Sfax (Tunisia) and Javier Nogueras-Iso from the Advanced Information Systems (IAAA) Lab at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). In March 2022, she defended successfully her PhD dissertation with the title “Documents deblurring using Deep Learning”. This PhD investigated the use and improvement of different deep learning techniques to solve three different problems that may arise in document images: blur, noise and low resolution. The main contribution of her PhD was the proposal of deep neural network architectures, mainly based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), for deblurring, denoising and super-resolution of text images.

In addition, it must be noted that she made her PhD research in an international environment, performing two research stays (March-May 2018; September-November 2019) at the Advanced Information Systems (IAAA) Lab, which belongs to the Aragon Institute of Engineering Research (I3A) at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). Moreover, between February 2020 and July 2021 she joined IAAA lab as a researcher providing support to the application of machine learning techniques in different projects.