Dr. Chowdhury specializes in designing Conversational AI models, primarily addressing complex challenges such as multispeaker interactions, nuanced multilingual and dialect variations, and code-switching, among various other intricate conversational dynamics. She is currently the leading (PI) on the QVoice project, which empowers speakers—both native and non-native of all ages alike—to learn spoken Arabic. The QVoice project leverages adaptive speech technologies and multimodal feedback modules as its underlying technologies. Dr. Chowdhury has received numerous awards and grants, including the NVIDIA Academic Hardware Grant for her research in simulating human language learning capabilities using DNN-based language models, a study that was also conducted as a part of the TRAILs project, funded by PRIN MIUR. As a key contributor to the EU-funded projects SENSEI and PortDial, Dr. Chowdhury developed conversational models adept at understanding human conversation, facilitating automatic summarization and mental health screening. She authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier conferences and journals and played an active role in the research community by organizing shared tasks, challenges, and workshops, as well as serving on the committees of top-tier conferences and special interest groups. She co-founded the Bangla Language Processing Community and MyVoice, a crowdsourced platform, designed to bridge the gaps between standard and dialectal Arabic resources.

Dr. Rashid Yahiaoui is currently an Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Language, Culture and Communication at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of Hamad bin Khalifa University, Qatar. He has a PhD in Translation Studies from London Metropolitan University, UK, and a Master in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Salford, UK. Dr. Yahiaoui has a wealth of experience lecturing in translation and interpreting, EFL, and academic writing. He also has extensive experience as a professional interpreter, working for the Foreign Office and National Health Service in the UK for over 10 years.

Dr. Amer Al-Adwan is currently an associate professor of audiovisual translation in the Department of Language, Culture and Communication at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). He received his BA in English Language and Literature from Yarmouk University, Jordan in 2003, and his MA in Applied Translation in 2005 from the University of Exeter, UK. He also obtained his doctorate in Translation and Intercultural Studies from the University of Manchester in 2009. Before joining HBKU in 2014, he worked as an assistant professor at Jordan University and Applied Science University, Jordan, where he taught several courses in translation and intercultural studies. He also worked for a few international institutions, including BBC Arabic and Aljazeera English, as a translator and a subtitler.  

Dr. Mohamed Mahmoud Abdallah is a Professor and founding faculty member at the College of Science and Engineering and serves as the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Quality Assurance at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Dr. Abdallah earned his BSc. from Cairo University in 1996, followed by his MSc and PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2001 and 2006, respectively. From 2006 to 2016, he held academic positions at Cairo University and Texas A&M University at Qatar.

Dr. Abdallah’s research focuses on leveraging AI in smart cities, wireless networks, and smart grids, with a particular emphasis on network optimization and security. He has received several awards, including the Research Fellow Excellence Award from Texas A&M University at Qatar and multiple Best Paper Awards at IEEE conferences. He also received the Nortel Networks Industrial Fellowship for five consecutive years (1999-2003). Dr. Abdallah has served in key editorial roles for top IEEE journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Communications, and in leadership positions for several major IEEE conferences. He has authored over 220 papers, co-authored four book chapters, and holds four patents.

Since August 2015, Anastasios has been working at the Qatar Computing Research Institute as a systems engineer under the division of the Research Computing IT Infrastructure team. He mainly works on supporting, configuring and administering QCRI’s Private Cloud and Azure Public Cloud, back-end IT infrastructure systems, while coping with researchers’ requirements for IT infrastructure provisioning and services design and deployment.

QCRI has made great strides in the utilization of Private & Public Clouds, allowing researchers to self-provision IaaS, PaaS and other IT services, and Anastasios has contributed to this success. He is working extensively in the area of performance optimization of QCRI’s back-end systems, in the building of monitoring tools for the core systems of QCRI’s Private Cloud, and in helping researchers efficiently utilize resources and build services and applications, on top of our virtualized environment.

Anastasios is a focal point for designing and deploying services and applications, providing Linux-based servers (as virtual machines) to researchers, on top of our virtualized private cloud. He acts as a liaison between QCRI and vendors (VMware, EMC, DC services provider), for any support cases and escalation. He also documents architectural and functional specifications of QCRI's core internal systems, applications and infrastructure.

Ahmed Al-Saadi is a software engineer with experience in a variety of domains. Before joining QCRI, he worked in a Canadian company, conducting distributed denial of service (DDoS) testing, among other things. He believes in applying software engineering principles that are grounded in academic research to solve real-world, practical problems.

His specialties and interests include web, mobile, concurrent systems, fault-tolerant systems, application security and network security. He is a graduate of Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.

Dr. Husrev Taha Sencar is a principal scientist at QCRI's cybersecurity group. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at TOBB University, Ankara, Turkey. During 2012-2015, he served as the local director of the Center for Cyber Security at NYU Abu Dhabi. Taha is a renowned digital forensics expert specializing in source attribution and forensic data recovery. His research at QCRI focuses on building AI-powered solutions to address security challenges and improving the robustness of AI models. He earned his PhD from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2004.

Dr. Ferda Ofli is a Principal Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute. Before joining QCRI, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, from 2010 to 2014. He received BSc degrees both in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Computer Engineering, and a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2005 and 2010, respectively.

Dr. Ofli's research interests span computer vision, machine learning, remote sensing, and multimedia signal processing. In recent years, his work has focused on applying deep learning techniques to image data from diverse sources, including the Internet, UAVs, and satellites, to enhance object recognition and scene understanding in real-world conditions. His research is particularly driven by applications in the social good domain, including disaster response, crisis management, and sustainable development. To tackle the challenges posed by real-world distribution shifts, he leverages domain adaptation, domain generalization, open-set/open-world recognition, and zero-shot and few-shot learning techniques.

Dr. Ofli is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, with over 80 publications in top-tier conferences and journals, including CVPR, ECCV, WWW, AAAI, IJCV, and PAMI. His contributions have been recognized with several awards, including the AAAI Deployed Application Award (2024), Best Paper Awards at ISCRAM (2019–2020), the Elsevier JVCI Best Paper Award (2015), and the IEEE SIU Best Student Paper Award (2011). He has also received multiple Outstanding Reviewer Awards from CVPR (2020, 2021, 2025) and SIU (2023). Beyond academia, his work has been featured in the BBC, New Scientist, Wired, and other mainstream media outlets.