Welcome


Muhammad Imran Short bio: Dr. Muhammad Imran is a Principal Scientist and Lead of the Crisis Computing team at Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. His research focuses on developing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics methods and systems to support humanitarian response, crisis management, and disaster resilience. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Trento, Italy, in 2013. Over the past decade, he has led the development and deployment of AI systems for real-world humanitarian response, used by UN agencies, governments, NGOs, and emergency management partners across multiple disaster settings. Dr. Imran has authored more than 120 peer-reviewed publications and has received several awards, including HBKU’s 2026 Research Excellence Award, the AAAI-IAAI Deployed Application Award, the Grand Prize at the Open Source Software World Challenge, and five best paper awards. His work has been featured in major media outlets, including the BBC, WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, and Forbes. He has delivered keynote and invited talks internationally and serves the research community through editorial, conference leadership, and program committee roles.

Public profiles: Google Scholar | ResearchGate | LinkedIn

Latest news

  • May 2026: Received the HBKU Research Excellence Award for research contributions at Qatar Computing Research Institute. More details.
  • April 2026: Our U.S. patent, Remote Sensing and Social Sensing for Flood Mapping, was issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. More details.
  • 2026: Our paper DisasterVQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Dataset for Disaster Scenes was accepted at ICWSM 2026. More details.
  • 2025: Our article AI-Driven Disaster Response and Displacement Monitoring was published in Communications of the ACM. More details.
  • 2025: Our paper Evaluating Robustness of LLMs on Crisis-Related Microblogs across Events, Information Types, and Linguistic Features was published in the proceedings of The Web Conference. More details.
  • 2024: Our article Fusing Remote and Social Sensing Data for Flood Impact Mapping was published in AI Magazine. More details.
  • 2024: Our Flood Insights system paper received the AAAI-IAAI Deployed Application Award. More details.
  • 2023: Our ACL paper IDRISI-RA: The First Arabic Location Mention Recognition Dataset of Disaster Tweets introduced a benchmark for Arabic crisis geolocation research. More details.
  • 2022: Our paper TBCOV: Two Billion Multilingual COVID-19 Tweets with Sentiment, Entity, Geo, and Gender Labels was published in Data. More details.
  • 2020: Our paper Rapid Damage Assessment Using Social Media Images by Combining Human and Machine Intelligence received the Best Paper Award at ISCRAM 2020. More details.
  • 2020: Our article Using AI and Social Media Multimodal Content for Disaster Response and Management was published in Information Processing & Management. More details.
  • 2018: Our paper CrisisMMD: Multimodal Twitter Datasets from Natural Disasters was published at ICWSM 2018. More details.
  • 2015: Our survey paper Processing Social Media Messages in Mass Emergency was published in ACM Computing Surveys. More details.
  • 2013: Received the Best Paper Award at ISCRAM 2013 for Extracting Information Nuggets from Disaster-Related Messages in Social Media. More details.