Speakers

Bernard Ghanem is currently a Professor (Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Chair of the Center of Excellence for Generative AI at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). His research interests lie in computer vision and machine learning with emphasis on topics in video understanding, 3D recognition, foundations of deep learning, and its applications to science. He received his bachelor’s degree from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2005 and his MS/PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2010. His work has received several awards and honors, including several Best Paper Awards for workshops in CVPR, ECCV, and ICCV, a Abdul Hameed Shoman Arab Researchers Award for Big Data and Machine Learning in 2020, two Google Faculty Research Awards in 2015 (1st in MENA for Machine Perception) and in 2024, and an RDIA Research Excellence Award (2025). He co-authored more than 250 papers in his field. He has served as Area Chair (AC) for the main computer vision and machine learning conferences including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, and AAAI. He will serve as Program Chair (PC) of ICCV 2029.

Nour Al Hassan is a visionary entrepreneur and the Founder & CEO of Arabic AI and Tarjama&. Recognized by Forbes Middle East as a top tech leader, she has revolutionized how businesses, governments, and Fortune 500 companies engage with Arabic-speaking markets. Starting in Amman, Jordan, in 2008, Nour built Tarjama&. Now an industry leader in Arabic language solutions, she expanded the company to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and U.S. In 2025, she launched Arabic AI, the world’s leading enterprise Arabic artificial intelligence company. Nour has received numerous awards and recognitions, including EY Entrepreneur of the Year.

Shibl Mourad is a Director of Research Engineering at Google DeepMind, Shibl leads engineering teams focused on improving AI capabilities for Gemini and other Google models in areas such as reasoning, code, mathematics, and health. Shibl is passionate about combining best-in-class engineering practices with machine learning research to advance the frontiers of AI and use it to build a better world. He holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and a BEng in Computer Science, both from Queen Mary College, University of London. 

Waleed Al Balla is a Managing Partner of Sukna Ventures. He brings over two decades of hands-on experience at the intersection of technology, business, and venture capital. Waleed was instrumental in launching multiple investment vehicles and serving on the boards of several prominent technology companies. This holistic experience gives him a firsthand understanding of the capital gaps that can hinder high-growth companies. An engineer at heart, Waleed cut his teeth in Silicon Valley and beyond—coding and rolling out products across wireless, semiconductors, and enterprise at Microsoft, Cadence Design, Conexant, and Skyworks Solutions over eight years. He spent another 8 years in operator role with the regional tech powerhouse, Elm. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from King Saud University and an MSc in Computer Science from Oregon Health & Science University.

Mona is an experienced executive with expertise in driving change and leading digital transformation across healthcare systems, including roles at MNGHA,  the Ministry of Health and SDAIA. With a background in pharmacy and a master’s degree in Health Informatics, Mona brings deep domain knowledge alongside international consulting experience, including the integration of Artificial Intelligence into healthcare workflows, enabling organizations to unlock value and embrace emerging technologies. Today, at HUMAIN, Mona is working with an exceptional team to industrialize ALLAM, and together create AI health foundational model.

Hadi Salman is a Research Lead at OpenAI working on advancing the frontier of large language models, with a focus on improving their reasoning abilities. He currently leads research efforts on reasoning-centric training and synthetic data generation to build increasingly capable, self-improving AI systems. Hadi earned his PhD in Computer Science from MIT under Aleksander Madry, where he developed foundational approaches for robust and trustworthy machine learning. Prior to MIT, he worked at Microsoft Research and Uber ATG, and holds an M.S. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University as well as dual degrees in Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut.

Muhammad Ebraheem is the Chief Scientist of Mozn, a pioneering AI company driving innovation across industries and across the region. Under his leadership, Mozn has become a strong contender in the Arabic language technologies enterprise market with its flagship platform OSOSTM.

Mehdi is CPTO at AI 71 where he leads the product and engineering team applying research into products and services that bring the benefits of AI to enterprises. He joined AI 71 in 2024. Before that, he was Director and Head of Product at DeepMind and Google Brain. Mehdi holds a M.S. in Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique, a M.S. in International Affairs from Sciences-Po Paris and an MBA from Columbia University.

Jessica Schrouff is Director of Responsible AI within GSK's AI/ML organization where she leads efforts to ensure AI systems are developed and deployed ethically and responsibly. Her research focuses on fairness, interpretability and robustness of machine learning models particularly in healthcare applications. Prior to GSK, Jessica was a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind investigating responsible machine learning for healthcare. Before joining Alphabet in 2019, she was a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow at University College London (UK) and Stanford University (USA), developing ML techniques for neuroscience discovery and clinical predictions. Throughout her career, Jessica has addressed not only technical advancement of ML methods but also critical aspects of their deployment such as credibility, fairness and interpretability.

Nafez is the Managing Partner at Anara Impact Capital, $50M fund that invests in learning, wellbeing and environmental resilience across the MENA region. Previously Nafez co-founded BLDR, a venture studio focused on pioneering the future of work and learning in the MENA region by launching industry leading edtech and fintech companies. Nafez founded Edraak.org, the largest open Arabic online education portal that today reaches almost 10 million learners across the MENA region – where he was the Executive Chairman until late 2022. An initiative of the Queen Rania Foundation, Edraak’s learners come from all across the region and include disadvantaged youth in Gaza, Syria, and Iraq. Nafez was recognized for his work at Edraak as one of the top 50 “Makers+Shakers” in education technology globally by EdtechXGlobal in 2016; and received the Order of Independence First Class on behalf of Edraak from HM Abdullah II King of Jordan in 2017. Nafez has a master’s in educational neuroscience from Harvard where he focused on Arabic literacy. For his undergraduate work at Yale, Nafez completed a yearlong, award winning, thesis on the Obstacles towards Curriculum Reform in the Middle East, using Jordan and the UAE as case studies, of which the Mohammed Bin Rashed School of Government in the UAE published an executive summary in 2011. 

Badih Ghazi is a Research Scientist at Google Research, where he leads a team of researchers and engineers working on privacy-preserving machine learning and analytics, and applications to the Gemini family of large language models. Before joining Google, he completed his undergraduate studies at the American University of Beirut, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT.

Dr. Mona Nabil Demaidi is an AI expert, entrepreneur, and academic leader. She is the Vice President for Artificial Intelligence and Director of International Relations at Arab American University, where she spearheads AI integration across education, research, and innovation. Dr. Demaidi is the architect of Palestine’s Artificial Intelligence National Strategy and UNESCO’s AI & Ethics Policy for Palestine. Beyond academia, she chairs the Intersect Innovation Hub (powered by Bank of Palestine) and is the Founder and CEO of STEMpire, a company advancing AI and entrepreneurship ecosystems. Recognized globally for her impact, she was named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI & Ethics and the 100 Brilliant Women of Davos in AI. 

Omar Attia is a senior research engineer at the machine learning research group (MLR) at Apple, where he works on developing embodied and interactive foundation models. Omar holds a master's degree in Computer Science from University of Waterloo, Canada, and a Bachelor's degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt.

Ibrahim is a research scientist at the Frontier AI unit at Google DeepMind in Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to joining Google, he founded and led the Advanced Analytics team at Saudi Aramco and managed the company's Enterprise Analytics program. He holds an MS degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and PhD in Computer Science from KAUST.

Dr. Adly is the Advisor to the Minister of Communication & Information Technology for R&D. She is also a Professor of Computer & Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. She has obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University, UK in 1995. She has served in several positions since 1988 locally and abroad. Dr. Adly served as Head of ICT sector at Bibliotheca Alexandrina for more than 20 years, where she was responsible for the BA's overall ICT strategy & the design and implementation of its digital initiatives. She was appointed as First Deputy to the Minister of Communications & Information Technology From 2013 to 2016. She is author/co-author of more than 80 publications in peer reviewed journals and scientific conferences.

Amir Yazdanbakhsh is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, working at the intersection of machine learning and computer architecture. His primary focus is on applying machine learning to design efficient and sustainable computing systems, from leading the development of large-scale distributed training systems on TPUs to shaping the next generation of Google's ML accelerators. His work has been recognized by the ISCA Hall of Fame. Notably, his research on using AI to solve performance challenges in hyperscale systems received an IEEE Micro Top Picks award, and his work on a new system for AI won the IEEE Computer Society Best Paper Award. Amir received his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a recipient of the Microsoft and Qualcomm fellowships.

Amr Khalifa is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind advancing large language models towards AGI. Currently focused on model design research for Gemini.

Negar Rostamzadeh is a Staff Research Scientist at Google Research, an Adjunct Prof at McGill School of Computer Science and an Associate Industry Member at MILA, Montreal. Her research is on the intersection of Machine Learning and Responsible AI. 

Hamed Hassani is currently an associate professor of the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department, the Computer and Information Systems Department, and the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, he was a research fellow at Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (UC Berkeley) affiliated with the program of Foundations of Machine Learning, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Machine Learning at ETH Zurich. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer and Communication Sciences from EPFL, Lausanne. He is the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Information Theory Society Thomas M. Cover Dissertation Award, 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Student Paper Award, 2017 Simons- Berkeley Fellowship, 2020 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award, 2020 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, 2020 Intel Rising Star award, the distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Information Society in 2022-23, and the 2023 IEEE Communications Society & Information theory Society Joint Paper Award. Moreover, he was selected as the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Information Theory Society's James L. Massey Research and Teaching Award for Young Scholars.

Mehdi is Tech Lead at Google DeepMind. With over a decade of experience in the field, he is passionate about building systems that can perceive and generate the world in 3D. Previously, he completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems with Bernhard Schölkopf, supported by a fellowship from ETH Zürich CLS.

Poliana Geha is a Government Affairs & Public Policy (GAPP) Manager for Google Cloud across emerging markets. Poliana currently covers the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey as part of her focus. In her capacity as GAPP Cloud, Poliana works with governments, regulators, industry leaders, and third parties to shape and promote Cloud-favorable policy frameworks and accelerate existing and planned digital transformation initiatives at a country level. She has supported the drafting of regulatory and policy positions across a broad range of Cloud-relevant policy topics, including AI, data protection, privacy, data classification, and safe harbor. She is also responsible for leading on thought-leadership initiatives designed to amplify the economic benefits of Cloud and AI adoption as well as nurturing government engagements as they relate to Google Cloud regions.

Sanjay Chawla is the Chief Scientist of Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He contributed to the National AI Strategy of Qatar in 2019 and the Impact of AI on Jobs in Qatar report in 2020. His current research interests include uncertainty quantification and out of distribution detection in data mining and machine learning. He served as the PC-CoChair of the research track of SIGKDD 2021.  Before joining QCRI, he was a Professor in the School of IT, University of Sydney, Australia.

Carlos Hinojosa is a postdoctoral researcher at KAUST, where he works with Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research interests span computer vision, AI safety and privacy, machine learning, and AI for science. Specifically, he focuses on developing safe, trustworthy, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science with Laureate distinction, obtained in 2022. Carlos has published at top conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and ICIP, and in IEEE journals including TMI and JSTSP, and holds two US patents. He received the Best Paper Award at the ICIP 2022 conference, and his work on learning privacy-preserving optics for computer vision applications has received multiple awards and been featured in different highlights.

Ruba Haroun is a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind specializing in diffusion models for media generation. Previously, her research focused on efficient model design for transformers. Ruba also has experience with reward modeling for LLMs and code generation.

Mehdi Bennani is a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind. He has worked on Project Astra, a real-time multimodal AI assistant, as well as Gemini Safety. Previously, he has been working on AI for drug discovery at Aqemia, among the first hires. He worked on designing generative algorithms and building a Machine Learning and Physics integrated platform to design small molecules. He holds a MEng from ENSAE ParisTech in Statistics and Economics.

George Turkiyyah is a Research Professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Before joining KAUST, he was Professor at the American of Beirut (AUB) where he also served as Chair of the Computer Science department.  Prior to joining AUB, he was Assistant then Associate Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. Prof. Turkiyyah obtained his Bachelor of Engineering from AUB and his MS and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are in computational science broadly, including numerical simulation and optimization, HPC, training of ML models, and AI applications. His work has produced a number of widely used simulation codes for various engineering applications, and led to a software startup and a number of patents. He has won a number of awards including the TRB K.B. Woods award for best paper in Design and Construction and best presentation/poster awards in ACM Solid and Physical Modeling and MMVR.

Pranali is a software engineer at Google DeepMind, working mostly on using LLMs and building embeddings for scientific tasks. She has been at Google/ DeepMind for 9 years, and finished her bachelors in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Madras in India prior to that. Fun fact, Pranali contributed her voice for text to speech translation in Marathi language across all Google platforms, which is the third most spoken language in India by ~84M people.

Andres Villa is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the IVUL lab at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), focusing on AI for Science, Continual Learning, Visual Language Models, and Action Understanding. Andres Villa received a bachelor's in Electronic Engineering at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 2017. Moreover, he received his PhD in Computer Science at Pontifical Catholic University in 2023 in Santiago, Chile. Before joining KAUST, Andres was a teaching assistant for undergraduate and graduate students in the Engineering department at Pontifical Catholic University in Chile from 2019 until 2024.

Mithun Jacob is a Staff Research Engineer at Google DeepMind working on robot vision. His recent contributions include novel position encoding for transformers and real-time on-robot VLA navigation. He previously led mapping and localization at Everyday Robots and the Bosch-Daimler automated driving project. He holds a PhD from Purdue University and an MSE from the University of Pennsylvania in robotics.

Natasha is a Senior Research Engineer at Google DeepMind, where she has spent the last five years building deep learning models to decipher the function of DNA. A passionate educator in the AI-for-science space, she is the author of the O’Reilly book “Deep Learning for Biology” and teaches at venues like Deep Learning Indaba and EEML.

Gergő Ignácz is a Postdoctoral Researcher at KAUST, working on research that intersects machine learning, chemical engineering, and material science, focusing on developing data-driven approaches for membrane science and industrial separations. He earned his PhD from KAUST, his MRes from the University of Manchester, and has prior experience in the pharmaceutical industry.

Juan Carlos L. Alcazar is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Visual Computing Center (VCC) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), working with Professor Bernard Ghanem at the Image and Video Understanding Laboratory (IVUL).

Tamara Norman works in the Science team at Google DeepMind as the Fusion Tech Lead where the team aims to apply AI to accelerate the path to fusion as an energy source. She works on both developing simulation tools (including the open-source TORAX) and research infrastructure, in particular on how to create intuitive abstractions that are easy to interact with. Previously, she worked on training of large-scale AI models in JAX, especially on model partitioning strategies and associated user API.

Robert Hoehndorf is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), where he leads the Bio-Ontology Research Group (BORG). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Leipzig and previously held positions at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the European Bioinformatics Institute, University of Cambridge, and Aberystwyth University.

Salem Lahlou's research focuses on AI for science tools, including interactive learning, sample-efficient reinforcement learning, and language model reasoning. He has been instrumental in developing GFlowNets, a novel class of generative models for compositional objects with applications in accelerating scientific discovery. Prior to joining MBZUAI, he worked at Booking.com, IBM, Google, and TII. He holds a Ph.D. from Université de Montréal and master's degrees from École Normale Supérieure and École Polytechnique.

Miruna is a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind, based in Paris, where she has been working for over six years. Miruna is currently focused on AI for Education, building evaluation frameworks and student simulators to improve the next generation of AI tutors. In the past, she worked on AI for Democracy, multi-agent systems, and the exploration problem in reinforcement learning. Her broader research interests include AI for social good, AI governance, and language evolution. In her free time, she enjoys creative writing, oil painting, and reading literature.

Alex Bewley is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind in Zurich, where he investigates novel approaches to machine learning, perception, and generalist robotics. His recent work explores advanced embodied reasoning and motion transfer in robotic systems. Previously, he was a Principal Research Scientist at Wayve, developing new methods for autonomous driving. Before moving to industry, he was a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford's Applied Artificial Intelligence Lab. There, his research covered multi-task learning, unsupervised domain adaptation, and model interpretability. He completed his PhD at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision, where his thesis centered on object detection and tracking for field robotics. He holds a Bachelor of Mechatronic Engineering from the University of Sydney.

Andrew El-Kadi is a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind, working on the Weather effort. He completed his MEng in Mathematics and Computer Science at Imperial College London in 2023, where he focused on Quantum Algorithms for Satisfiability Problems. His current work focuses on scaling and operationalising ML weather models, recently working on GenCast: diffusion-based ensemble forecasting for medium-range weather.