MIT Technology Review Arabia names Birzeit University’s Mustafa Jarrar one of the top Arab AI experts

Mustafa Jarrar, a professor of computer science at Birzeit University, has been named one of the top 30 Arab experts in artificial intelligence in the first edition of the “Leading Arab Experts in AI” listing, published by MIT Technology Review Arabia.

Jarrar was listed among the 30 foremost AI experts in the Arab world by a selection committee that reviewed the research efforts and impact of 280 experts from countries including Palestine, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Oman, Lebanon, Bahrain and Tunisia.

The researchers included in the list have been recognized for their efforts to promote and drive forward advancements in AI, whether at public, private or academic institutions. As the 30 leading AI experts in the Arab world, these researchers have played a key role in facilitating the application and adoption of AI technologies in their countries by creating start-ups and driving forward research in natural language processing, robotics, machine learning and big data, among other nascent and established fields.

Jarrar, who directs Birziet University’s recently launched Ph.D. program in computer science, has led several important research projects, especially in Arabic computational linguistics, such as the Lexicographic Search Engine, which includes an Arabic linguistic ontology and 150 digitized Arabic-multilingual dictionaries, and the Palestinian Dialect Corpus. For his efforts, Jarrar received multiple illustrious awards, including the Abdul Hameed Shoman Arab Researchers Award in Technology, the Mohammed Bin Rashid Award for Arabic Language, and the Google Research Award, among others. Jarrar was also a recipient of several prestigious fellowships, such as the Fulbright Fellowship and the Marie Curie Fellowship.