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. Muhammad Imran is a Senior Scientist and Lead of the Crisis Computing team at Qatar Computing Research Institute. Dr. Imran received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Trento in 2013. He then worked as a Research Scientist at QCRI from 2015-2020. 

Dr. Imran has published over 80 research papers in top-tier international conferences and journals, including ACL, SIGIR, ICDM, ICWSM, and WWW. Four of his papers received the "Best Paper Award" and two "Best Paper Runner-up Award." He has been serving as a co-chair of the Social Media Studies track of the ISCRAM international conference since 2014 and has served as Program Committee for many major conferences and workshops.
 

Dr. Mohamad Saad is a Research Scientist in the Data Analytics group at Qatar Computing Research Institute. He joined QCRI in February 2017 and works on topics in Statistical Genetics, Biostatistics, and Bioinformatics. Dr. Saad has a background in applied mathematics and statistics. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics (Majoring in Statistics) at the Lebanese University in 2006, before he moved to France where he obtained his master's degree in Statistics/Biostatistics from the University of Montpellier II, Monpellier in 2007, and his PhD in Statistical Genetics/Biostatistics/Bioinformatics from the University of Paul Sabatier III, Toulouse, in 2012. In Summer 2012, he moved to the United States for a Postdoctoral Senior Fellow position at the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington, Seattle, as a Postdoctoral Senior Fellow and stayed until Fall 2016. Dr. Saad has many peer-reviewed articles in top-tier journals including Nature Genetics, The Lancet, and Genome Research. 
 

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.

Hamdy Mubarak Hussien is a Principal Software Engineer at the Qatar Computing Research Institute of Hamad Bin Khalifa University.  He joined QCRI in 2014 and has participated in building state-of-the-art tools for processing the standard, classical, and dialectal varieties of Arabic (farasa.qcri.org), QATS Speech Transcription and Translation (qats.qcri.org and st.qcri.org), IYAS Question Answering, and Fake News Detection (tanbih.org) projects in addition to leading the efforts in analyzing social media texts (asad.qcri.org). He works on different aspects of the Arabic LLM, Fanar.

Before joining Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamdy Mubarak was the Arabic NLP R&D manager at Sakhr Software from 1994 to 2013 working on morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis of Arabic and building commercial NLP applications for governments. He has published 120+ papers in top-tier conferences on computational linguistics, speech, and social computing.

Dr. Issam Hmila obtained his PhD in Biology between the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, and the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia in 2010. He obtained an interuniversity diploma in advanced bioinformatics knowledge from the University-Paris Cité, France. He has also completed various courses in biostatistics, immunology, drug design, and discovery from international institutes.

His projects focus on the construction of combinatory libraries, phage display screening, and the engineering of nanobodies for immunotherapy. He was hired as an assistant professor at the Pasteur Institute in 2012, where he developed aptamers and new tools for detecting respiratory viruses of clinical importance in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, USA, and Uppsala University, Sweden. 

In 2017, he joined the Neurological Disorders Research Center at Qatar Biomedical Research Institute, where he conducted his research to develop new tools for therapy against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases based on nanobodies and aptamers. His work focuses on the generation of cortical neurons from induced pluripotent stem cells and the evaluation by global transcriptomic, proteomic, and integrated omics, environmental pollutants, and new drugs with potential Alzheimer's disease modulation.

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.

Abdulaziz Al-Homaid is a Software Engineer at Qatar Computing Research Institute of Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He has been working on leveraging insights from hospital health data. Specifically, he applied signal processing algorithms to detect abnormalities in electrocardiogram data during vigorous activity. He also worked on analyzing the relationship between exercise and glucose levels. He is experienced in utilizing libraries for large language models and training them on multi-GPU machines.