Our Expert Speakers

Boubakr Nour is a Senior Security Researcher at Ericsson Research and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia and previously at Université de Sherbrooke. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Beijing Institute of Technology (China) in 2020 and holds M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from Djillali Liabes University (Algeria). In 2016, he was a visiting researcher at Paris Descartes University (France). Dr. Nour has co-authored 60+ peer-reviewed publications and co-invented 5 patents. His research spans cybersecurity, threat hunting, 5G/6G security, next-gen networking, and IoT. He received the Ericsson Key Contributor Award, Impact Award, IEEE ComSoc Best Survey Paper Award (2024), Best Paper Awards at IEEE DSC 2024 and GLOBECOM 2018, and the Mitacs Elevate Fellowship (2022). He also won the Excellent Student Award at BIT in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Dr. Kaoutar El Maghraoui is a Principal Research Scientist and Manager at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where she leads a cross-functional team focused on AI model enablement and hardware-software co-design for IBM’s next-generation Spyre AI accelerator. Her research sits at the intersection of AI and systems, driving innovation in scalable and efficient AI infrastructure. She also serves as Principal Investigator of the AI Hardware Center testbed, supporting the development and adoption of cutting-edge digital and analog AI accelerators. In addition, she is an adjunct faculty member in computer science at Columbia University, New York. Dr. El Maghraoui has received several prestigious honors, including the Robert McNaughton Award for best computer science thesis at RPI, the Best of IBM Award, the IBM Technical Corporate Award, and the IEEE Women in Service Computing Award. She is an ACM Distinguished Member, ACM Distinguished Speaker, and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Akram Zaytar is a Senior Research Scientist at Microsoft’s AI for Good Research Lab, where he turns satellite imagery and GeoAI into actionable insights for climate resilience, food security, and biodiversity conservation. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at IBM Research, building geospatial-ML tooling for weather-forecast post-processing and national-scale crop mapping. His work—spanning deep neural networks, foundation models, and self-supervised learning—has been featured at ICLR, ICML, and IJCAI. Holding a Ph.D. in applied deep learning, Akram mentors Ph.D. residents and regularly teaches GeoAI workshops aimed at using AI for social good across Africa and beyond.

Amal Rannen-Triki is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Prior to joining Google DeepMind in 2019, she earned her PhD from KU Leuven in Belgium. Her work focuses on creating models that learn efficiently and perform equitably. Her research interests include regularisation, continual learning, and specialised loss functions, with a recent emphasis on the continual adaptation of large language models. She is currently concentrating on bias evaluation and mitigation and the broader social impacts of AI. A strong advocate for equitable access to technology and AI, Amal is actively involved in expanding opportunities in the field. She is a member of the executive board of the Deep Learning Indaba, an organization dedicated to strengthening machine learning and AI in Africa, and served as a General Chair for its main event in 2023. Additionally, she is a co-founder of the MENA-ML winter school. Amal also contributes to the scientific community as an organizer for various confer

Dr. David Adelani is an Assistant Professor at the McGill University School of Computer Science, a Core Academic Member at Mila - Quebec AI Institute, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and an IVADO Professor. Prior to his appointment at McGill University, he was a Post-doctoral or DeepMind Academic Fellow at University College London, United Kingdom. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science at the Department of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University, Germany in 2023 with a Dr.-Eduard-Martin Outstanding Doctoral Prize. His research interests include multilingual natural language processing and speech processing with a focus on low-resource languages. He is a Director at the Masakhane Research Foundation, a grassroots organisation whose mission is to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. Some of his research on AfricaNLP have received Paper Awards including Best Paper Award (Global Challenges) at COLING 2022 for developing AfroXLMR, a mult

Kamal is an experienced senior leader and academic in Higher Education with an international background and an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the UK Higher Education sector. Kamal worked at senior level with several UK universities, up to Pro-VC level, leading Computing, Engineering and Business faculties. In his latest role at the University of Gloucestershire, where he was the Head of the School of Computing and Engineering, he was the University lead for cyber security providing leadership for key cyber strategic projects. Key roles: • Founder and CEO of Hi-Ed International and Chair of Minsky Academy, offering Continuous Professional Development and Masters courses in advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, and Blockchain Technologies. • Artificial Intelligence Programme Director, Right Brain Thinking International. • A founding member of the UK Institute of Coding (within which he led the Theme on Educating the Educators and introduced a num

Dr. Oumaima Hourrane is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the School of Science and Engineering (SSE) at Al Akhawayn University. She specializes in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on low-resource languages and deep learning. Dr. Hourrane earned her PhD in Computer Science from Hassan II University of Casablanca in 2022, where her research centered on semantic textual similarity and cross-lingual plagiarism detection using deep learning techniques. She has contributed to notable projects and holds multiple publications in international journals and conferences.

Farah ALHAQUI IT engineer with 16 years experience in managing projects and cross functional teams for IT and Data projects mainly in Telecomunications sector. PhD in AI and member of WAI Morocco. AI Trainer Keynote speaker.

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