Talks and Lectures


A full list of my invited talks and lectures can be found on this page.

  • (Invited talk): AI for Social Impact and Sustainable Development, at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Surge Data Hub training program on Social Media Analytics, April 2nd, 2024.

  • (Guest lecture): AI for Disaster Response and Sustainable Development, at National University of Singapore, April 1st, 2024.

  • (Guest lecture): Mapping Education Insecurities using AI, at Georgetown University Qatar, March 5th, 2024.

  • (Panel/Speaker): Data innovation for leaving no one behind, at The Arab Forum for Sustainable Development (AFSD), Beirut, Lebanon, 14-16 March, 2023. (Event link, Video recording)

  • (Invited talk): Mapping Flood Exposure, Damage, and Population Needs Using Remote and Social Sensing. at the 3rd Annual Workshop on Social Media for Disaster Risk Management: Researchers Meet Practitioners. Ispra, Italy. June 7-8, 2023.

  • (Keynote/demo): Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response, at the 4th Workshop on the Data for the Wellbeing of the Most Vulnerable at ICWSM, June 5, 2023. Link: https://sites.google.com/view/dataforvulnerable23

  • (Guest lecture): The Role of AI and Non-Traditional Data Sources for Rapid Damage Assessment, at CIFAL Centre at York University, Canada, November 9, 2022.

  • (Panel): Precision in Sustainable Development and AI, at the regional workshop, “the Changing Role of Official Statistics in Qatar: Data Culture Matters” jointly organized by the Planning and Statistics Authority (PSA) and QCRI, Sep 21-22, 2022. (YouTube, Press: HBKU, GulfTimes, The Peninsula Qatar)

  • (Guest lecture): Use of AI for Monitoring Attacks on Education, at Georgetown University in Qatar, August 30, 2022.

  • (Keynote): Social Media for Emergency Response: From Research to Practice, at The 2nd Social Media for Disaster Risk Management: Researchers Meet Practitioners workshop organized by Joint Research Center (JRC), June 7, 2022. (Link)

  • (Guest lecture): AI and Social Media for Social Good, , at The University of Sheffield, May 17, 2022.

  • (Invited talk & panalist): Overview of the Two Billion Multilingual COVID-19 Tweets with Sentiment, Entity, Geo, and Gender Labels dataset, at The Middle East Conference, February 6, 2022. (YouTube recording)

  • (Guest lecture): Mapping Education Insecurity using AI, at Georgetown University in Qatar, February 15, 2022.

  • (Invited talk): Extracting Information from Social Media for Crisis Response, at The United Nations Environment Programme event on the use of AI for disaster response, September 28, 2021.

  • (Invited talk and panalist): The Role of AI and Collective Intelligence for Disaster Response, at Nesta UK event on Collective Crisis Intelligence for Frontline Humanitarian Action, September 15, 2021. (Event page).

  • (Keynote): How AI is Transforming Disaster Response, at the International Symposium on IoT & ML for Ecosystem Restoration & Multi-hazard Resilience, June 2021. (Video recording on Youtube).

  • (Invited talk) Harnessing Social Media and Survey Text Mining for Covid-19 Socio-economic Impact Assessments and Disaster Response and Recovery: Some Evidence from Ecuador, Egypt, and Lebanon. With Donny El Costa at the UNDP-SEAI Webinar series, Nov 2020, (online).

  • (Guest lecture) Using AI and Social Media for Education Insecurity Data Mining. At Georgetown University in Qatar. September, 2020 (online).

  • (Invited talk) Computer Vision for Damage Assessment. World Food Program (WFP) computer vision for damage assessment workshop, Nov 2020, (online).

  • (Invited talk) Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response. At Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, August, 2020 (online).

  • (Webinar) AI and Social Media for Social Good. Webinar series organized by Re.Work about AI for Good, June, 2020.
    Webinar video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0Ceu-WRbIU

  • (Inivted talk) Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response, at the US Chamber Foundation, 2019, Washington DC, USA.

  • (Inivted talk) AI and Social Media for Social Good, at IBM Research Lab Zurich, 2019, Zurich, Switzerland.

  • (Inivted talk) AI and Social Media for Social Good, at the University of Zurich, 2019, Zurich, Switzerland.

  • (Inivted talk) Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response, at CIEM (Centre for Integrated Emergency Management) at the University of Agder, 2019, Kristiansand, Norway.

  • (Inivted talk) Time-Critical Analysis of Multimodal Social Media Data for Disaster Response, at CAIR (Artificial Intelligence Research Centre), 2019, Kristiansand, Norway.

  • (Inivted talk) AI and Social Media for Disaster Respones and Associated Challenges. Invited talk at the University of Chile, December 2018, Santiago, Chile.

  • (Inivted talk) Artificial Intelligence for Mining Attacks on Education Data on Social Media Invited talk at Doha Forum, December 2018, Doha, Qatar.

  • (Keynote) The Role of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response. Keynote talk at the 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), 2016, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

  • (Invited talk) Real-Time Analysis of Social media For Disaster Response. Invited talk at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (EU-JRC), 2016, Ispra, Italy.

  • (Invited talk) Social Computing: A Lifeline During Mass Convergence Events Invited talk delivered at the 1st International Conference on Innovative Computing, organized by UMT, 2016, Lahore, Pakistan.

  • (Invited talk) Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response Invited talk at The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Geneva, 2015, Switzerland.

  • (Invited talk) Introduction to Machine Learning: An Application to Disaster Response Inited talk delivered at Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP), 2015, Doha, Qatar.