Speakers

Firoj Alam is a Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), HBKU. He received his PhD from the University of Trento, Italy, and has been working for more than ten years in Artificial Intelligence, Deep/machine learning, Natural Language Processing, Social media content, Image Processing, and Conversation Analysis. His current research interest includes LLMs, fact-checking, multimodal propaganda detection in multiple languages. He previously presented tutorials at WWW-2022 and WSDM-2022 on the topic of “Fact-Checking, Fake News, Propaganda, And Media Bias”. He was a co-organizer of different shared tasks CheckThat! 2020-2024 at CLEF, SemEval-2021 task 6 (propaganda detection in memes), SemEval-2024 task (multilingual detection of persuasion techniques in memes), WANLP shared task (2022-2023) and the NLP4IF-2021 shared task. He is also a co-organizer of the BLP-2023 workshop, which is co-located with EMNLP-2023.

Shammur Absar 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. 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..

Sabri Boughorbel is a Scientist at QCRI, HBKU. He received his PhD in Machine Learning from the university of Paris Sud. He has an extensive experience in Machine Learning for industrial and academic research. He authored more than 70 peer-reviewed papers and 7 patents. He was awarded several grants in the intersection of machine learning and health. His current research is on leveraging open-sourced LLMs for low-resource languages and developing multi-modal language models. He serves as PC member of top-tier machine learning conferences. In 2023, he co-organized a workshop on AI for Medicine.

Maram Hasanain is a PostDoctoral researcher at QCRI, HBKU. She received here PhD in Computer Science from Qatar University. Her current research interests are Arabic NLP, applied machine learning, and LLMs. Maram co-authored over 20 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier conferences and journals. She has been a co-organizer in the CheckThat! lab at CLEF 2019-2021, and 2023. She was also a co-organizer of the BroDyn’18 workshop on analysis of broad dynamic topics over social media co-located with ECIR’18.