Sofiane Abbar is a Senior Software Engineer and Researcher at Qatar Computing Research Institute. He is leading the Urban Computing activity at QCRI with a specific focus on using AI and data-driven techniques to tackle big urban challenges related to mapping road networks, traffic congestion, mobility, air pollution, and resilience. He has initiated several projects with key entities from the public sector (e.g., Ministry of Transport and Communication and Smart Qatar Initiative), private sector (e.g. Karwa Taxi, Qatar Mobility Innovations Center), as well as academia (e.g. MIT Boston.)

Dr. Abbar has authored and co-authored over 40 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and has deployed several large-scale and real-time systems for road network inference from GPS traces, map updating from satellite images, in-traffic routing, and recommender engines for news. He acts as PC is several international conferences such as ACM CHI, AAAI ICWSM, and ACM CIKM. Dr. Sofiane Abbar earned his PhD from University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-En-Yvelines, France in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs. He graduated as a CS Engineer from Ecole Superieur d’Informatique (ex. INI, Algiers) in 2006.