Dr. Ehsan Pourkarimi obtained his undergraduate degree from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary. 

After receiving a Cancer Research Fellowship, he moved to the United Kingdom to join Professor Anton Gartner at the Wellcome Trust Center for Gene Regulation and Expression at the University of Dundee. During his post-doctoral work, Dr. Pourkarimi focused his research on understanding the effect of chromatin modifiers in cellular response during acute stress conditions. He then moved to New York City and worked as a Research Associate in the lab of Dr. Iestyn Whitehouse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where he studied DNA replication.

Dr. Lina Majed is an Assistant Professor at the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. She obtained her Master's and PhD degrees in Human Movement Science from Paris-Saclay University. Her research area focuses on a multidisciplinary approach to preferred motor behaviors. She is currently examining characteristics of gait patterns as related to health and the influences of culture and environments on gait. 

She has a keen interest in understanding the interplays between physical activity, preferred motor behaviors, health, and well-being. Dr. Lina is the leader of the national task force on the Qatar ‘Active Healthy Kids Report Card’ (part of a Global Alliance) in collaboration with several governmental and academic institutions. She has contributed to the National Physical Activity Guidelines for Qatar. With more than 10 years of academic experience, she has published several high-impact journal publications with direct relevance to Qatar and its population's health.

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. Mashael Al-Sabah is a Senior Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. Before that, Dr. Al-Sabah was an Assistant Professor at the computer science and engineering department at Qatar University. Her research interests lie in the areas of network security and privacy enhancing technologies, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology. She has published papers that were featured in various magazines such as Wired and New Scientist, and was awarded the Education Excellence Day Platinum Award for PhD holders in Qatar in 2014. Dr. Al-Sabah obtained her PhD from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 2013 and later spent 16 months at MIT as a visiting scientist.

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.