MENA ML

In the afternoon of Day 6, we continued with an Early Research Spotlight of two MenaML scholars:
- Yousra Farhani is a PhD researcher in Quantum Computing at the Niels Bohr Institute NQCP, University of Copenhagen. She is also founder of Quantum Africa, a pan-African organisation promoting quantum education, supporting, and connecting quantum talent across Africa. Her research spotlight took us into the world of Quantum ML.
- Dr. Mennatullah Hendawy is an interdisciplinary urban planner working at the intersections of cities, AI, media, technology and sustainability. She is an assistant professor in Egypt and affiliated with TU Munich and UC Santa Cruz. She shared her unique perspective in a talk on “The Era of Interdisciplinary and Socio-technical AI.”

For the final day of our morning program focused on and . We started with a keynote by Professor Hamed Hassani (University of Pennsylvania) on “Red Teaming LLMs.” Next up we had a tutorial by Jessica Schrouff from GSK that covered “Building Trustworthy ML,” a talk by Dr Mohamed Shaaban from Scale AI that tackled “LLM Evals and Guardrails,” and finally we heard from Google DeepMind’s Sharon Lin on “Security & Privacy of Agentic Systems.”

On Day 5 we also heard from Omar Khasawneh, KAUST Head of Entrepreneurship, giving practical advice on how to make the switch from academia into startups. He also explained more about the KAUST Accelerator program which is open to startups in Saudi Arabia. Separately, KAUST representatives held a Recruitment Q&A for those interested in joining KAUST.

Day 5’s panel talk was moderated by Poliana Geha (Google) and brought together a powerful mix of voices from government, research, and industry.
The discussion explored how we build an ecosystem that is not only innovative but sustainable and responsible, pinpointing the importance of localisation and data quality. Insights were shared by:
- Dr. Noha Adly from Ministry of ICT / Alexandria University
- Dr. Sanjay Chawla from QCRI
- Mehdi Ghissassi, CPO at AI 71

Working hard or hardly working? 🤔😏 We’re glad to spot your smiles during Day 5’s Labs. Google DeepMind’s Tamara Norman was back to lead an Efficient Python session, while Alex Bewley and Mithun Jacob (also Google DeepMind) explored Vision-Language Models and Robotics with our scholars.

Next, for our Day 5 morning program we were joined by three experts from Google DeepMind:
- Mehdi Sajjadi challenged us to think beyond static images as he led a tutorial on 4D Scene Representation.
- Miruna Pislar presented on AI for Society, zooming in on how AI can be used to make a positive impact on everyday lives.
- Andrew El-Kadi discussed AI for Weather Forecasting, demonstrating how AI has advanced complex weather predictions.
It is incredible to see the range of real-world problems being tackled by the experts in this room!

We couldn’t have asked for a more distinguished start to Day 5. Professor David Keyes from KAUST took the stage for a keynote titled “For What Should the Bell Toll?”
As a founding Dean of KAUST, a two-time Gordon Bell Prize winner, Professor Keyes offered a masterclass on the evolution of High Performance Computing.
His insights into scalable solvers and data sparsity served as a powerful reminder that behind every advanced AI model lies a foundation of extreme computing and rigorous mathematics. A true privilege to learn from a pioneer in the field!

From Agentic AI and Data Quality to innovation in Foodtech and Healthtech, we loved seeing our scholars’ work during Day 4 Poster Sessions

Next up was a vital panel conversation on the future of our ecosystem: “Bridging Research and Industry.”

Moderated by Nour Alkhalil from Clarity, this impressive all-female panel explored how we can translate academic excellence into real-world impact while shaping a unique identity for AI in the region.

Huge thanks to our panelists for sharing their distinct perspectives:

- Dr. Manar Abu Talib, Associate Professor at University of Sharjah, representing the academic research engine.
- Deena Alabed, Senior Data Scientist at Careem, bringing the perspective of the region’s first unicorn.
- Rema Algunaibet, Senior AI Solutions Architect at Groq, offering insights on architecture and global scalability.

Day 4 afternoon sessions focused on applying AI to solve complex physical challenges.
We heard from two experts at Google DeepMind who are bridging the gap between code and the physical world:
- Mehdi Bennani presented on “AI for Physics,” highlighting his research at Google DeepMind on one of the Clay Millennium Problems.
- Tamara Norman led “AI for Fusion,” giving us a masterclass in fusion technology and its challenges, and how Google DeepMind is using reinforcement learning to solve these challenges.
We were very inspired to see how this community is using AI to model, and potentially transform, our physical reality!

Following Day 4’s keynote, we continued to bridge the gap between computational power and scientific breakthrough.
We explored three critical frontiers:

- Amir Yazdanbakhsh from Google DeepMind led a tutorial on “Generative Optimization at Scale,” revealing how ML is reshaping computer architecture to enable sustainable, hyperscale computing.
- Robert Hoehndorf from KAUST shifted the focus to the life sciences, presenting on “Modeling Diseases with AI” and the role of bio-ontologies in understanding complex health data.
- Salem Lahlou from MBZUAI talked us through “Generative Modeling with Flow Networks and Applications in Sciences”, demonstrating how flow networks are being used to accelerate reasoning and scientific discovery.
A massive thank you to our speakers for highlighting the profound impact of AI across disciplines!