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.

George Mikros before assuming his Professor position at the MA Program of Digital Humanities at HBKU, he was Professor of Computational and Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Athens Greece. He is the director of the Computational Stylistics lab. He is also Adj. Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA. He had the position of Research Associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing and he was part of research groups that have developed significant language resources and NLP tools for Modern Greek. Since 1999 holds the position of Teaching Associate at the Hellenic Open University and since 2016 he is the Director of the Undergraduate Program “Spanish Language and Culture”. Prof. Mikros has authored 5 monographs and more than 80 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and edited volumes. Since 2007 he has been elected as Member of the Council of the International Association of Quantitative Linguistics (IQLA). In 2018 he was elected its President. He is a keynote speaker and invited speaker in many international conferences, workshops and summer schools related to Digital Humanities and Quantitative Linguistics. His main research interests are computational stylistics, quantitative linguistics, computational linguistics, and forensic linguistics.

Dr. Kabir Hassan Biswas joined the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University as an Assistant Professor in 2019 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2025. He earned his Master's and PhD through the prestigious Integrated PhD program at the Indian Institute of Science in 2007 and 2011, respectively. He then conducted postdoctoral research at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University between 2011 and 2019.

Dr. Biswas’s laboratory takes an interdisciplinary approach, integrating computational methods such as AI/deep learning-based protein design, protein structure-function analysis and drug discovery and experimental techniques such as bioluminescence-based biosensors and biointerfaces with the aim to advance fundamental understanding and developing potential treatment for cancer metastasis, cardiovascular diseases, and infectious diseases. His group is also developing point-of-care tests for health and disease monitoring.

Dr. Biswas has received several competitive research grants, including Academic Research Grant, HBKU Thematic Research Grant, and Industrial Innovation Fund, and has published in high-impact journals such as Science, PNAS, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature Communications. He has delivered invited talks at major international conferences and received multiple awards, including the Yamaguchi Medal and the Mrs. C. V. Hanumantha Rao Medal.

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 Research Assistant (Software Engineer) in the Energy Management program at QEERI. He is a graduate of Concordia University in Montréal with a Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng.) in Electrical Engineering. He has over 15 years of experience in a variety of domains, including web engineering, concurrent systems, fault-tolerant systems, application security, network security, among others. Ahmed believes in applying software engineering principles that are grounded in academic research to solve real-world, practical problems. 
 

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.

Dr. Ericsson attended both Uppsala and Stockholm University and obtained his PhD from Stockholm University in 1992. He then moved to the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), where he worked on the transcriptional regulation of cholesterol metabolism. 

Dr. Ericsson established his own independent research group in 1998 at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, focusing on the post-translational regulation of a family of transcription factors critical for cholesterol and lipid metabolism, i.e. the SREBP family of proteins. In 2009, Dr. Ericsson became an SFI Stokes Professor at University College Dublin, where his group continued their work on the transcriptional and post-translational regulation of lipid metabolism. Dr. Ericsson has been an Associate Professor at HBKU since May 2019.

Mourad Ouzzani is the Research Director of the Research Engineering Group whose mission is to productize QCRI's research. The group has produced several products some of which have been commercialized through different channels. These include SIHA, a system for integrated health analytics, QARTA, an AI-enabled map engine, Zaman, a smart bilingual news app for the Arab world, SAQR a social media analytics platform with a focus on Arabic, Fehris, a powerful personal content management system, and NxPalin, a system for explainable, transparent, and Fair AI.

Mourad conducts research in data management and analytics with a focus on data integration, data cleaning, and more recently data-centric AI. Mourad has played a key role in establishing the data analytics group (now QCAI) within QCRI. He was the project lead of Rayyan, the leading systematic reviews web and mobile app, which is being used by more than 250K users worldwide. Rayyan has since graduated from QCRI to a startup, Rayyan Systems Inc.  Mourad’s research work has led to numerous publications in top tier venues including PVLDB, TKDE, SIGMOD, and ICDE. Mourad has been PI or CoPI in more than 15 grant proposals funded by NSF, NIH, DHS, and other funding agencies.