Dr Heba El-Fiqi is a lecturer with the School of Engineering and Information Technology (SEIT), UNSW Canberra. Her research interest includes the areas of artificial intelligence, swarm intelligence, machine learning, and computational intelligence. ​Dr El-Fiqi contributions to the AI field includes a novel solution to a significant challenge in Air Traffic control using a novel AI Swarm control methodology. This first-of-its-kind solution will create a great impact on future concepts using AI for air traffic management of unmanned aerial vehicles. Furthermore, she developed an algorithm, Weighted Gate Layer Autoencoders (WGLAE),  that transforms classic imputation and interpolation uses of relationships learning to signal recovery, where data is correlated due to the time-series nature of the problem. The impact of WGLAE is a better utilization of usually discarded samples and enhancement of samples quality.

She is an IEEE active member. She co-chaired the Women in Artificial intelligence (WAI) activities for IEEE SSCI 2020 and Canberra AI week December 2020. She was an organizing committee member and a session chair for the IEEE CIS Workshop, hosted by UNSW Canberra in April 2018. She also serves as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on artificial intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, and a conference program committee member for a number of A/A* conferences, including AAAI, IJCAI, and ECAI.

Dr El-Fiqi actively supports the local female engineering community. She served as the Women in Engineering (WIE) coordinator for the school of SEIT at UNSW Canberra from 2018 to June 2020 and contributed to UNSW Canberra Young Women in Engineering (YoWIE) activities in 2018 and 2019.  She also led UNSW Canberra Engineering Pitch to Industry, a networking event between engineering students and engineering industry representatives.