Dr. Ahmed Ali is a Principal Engineer at the Arabic Language Technologies group (ALT) at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). He is the founder of Arabic Speech at ALT . His work interests are in the area of speech recognition and natural language processing. Dr. Ali completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and BSc at Cairo University. He joined QCRI in 2011. Prior to joining QCRI, Dr. Ali worked for Nuance in Cambridge, UK from 2009-2011, SpinVox (Marlow, startup) 2006-2009, and spent six years at different IBM labs prior to that, including two years at Watson, USA.
His current research on speech recognition has led to the development of state-of-the-art multi-dialect Arabic speech recognition: QCRI Advanced Transcription System (QATS). Al-Jazeera, DW and BCC have all used QATS to transcribe their online content. Dr. Ali’s team won first place in the worldwide MGB-2 speech recognition competition. He also received the prestigious Qatar Foundation Best Innovation Award in 2018.
QCRI
February 2016 to PresentQCRI
August 2011 to February 2016Nuance, Cambridge, UK
December 2009 to August 2011Spinvox, Marlow, Cambridge UK
March 2006 to December 2009IBM-Watson Research Center, USA
2003 - 2005IBM, Cairo, Egypt
2000 - 2006University of Edinburgh, Scotland/UK
2014 - 2017Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University; Cairo/Egypt
1994 - 2000InterSpeech 2019
2019ICASSP 2019
2019ICASSP 2019
2019e-WER; ACL 2018
2018Automatic Dialect Detection in Arabic Broadcast Speech; InterSpeech 2016
2016