Dr. Kessentini is a recipient of the prestigious 2018 President of Tunisia distinguished research award, the University distinguished teaching award, the University distinguished digital education award, the College of Engineering and Computer Science distinguished research award, 4 best paper awards including an IEEE 10 Year Most Influential Paper award (2011-2021), and his AI-based software refactoring invention, licensed and deployed by several Fortune 500 companies, and selected as one of the Top 8 inventions at the University of Michigan for 2018 (including the three campuses) by the UM Technology Transfer Office. He received several grants from both industry and federal agencies and published over 175 papers in top journals and conferences. He is leading a big AI initiative at SECS and OU.

Dr. Kessentini has extensive collaborations with the industry on different areas related to Edge AI, AI/MLOps, AI and cyber-physical systems, intelligent software bots, etc. He worked with blind and visually impaired engineering students to develop new intelligent systems for the generation of documentation for the source code of complex software. These technologies helped them in quickly understanding the source code and being able to contribute to the development of large-scale software systems. He is the co-founder of many workshops, General Chair of SSBSE16 and ASE22, and PC chair of MODELS19, SANER 2021, GECCO, etc. He served as a keynote speaker at various venues including ICSR, SSBSE, GECCO, WCCI, etc. He graduated 15+ Ph.D. students and served as associate editor in 7 journals and PC member of over 150 conferences.