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Current Positions

• Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Research & Innovation and Head of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Saraya Hamra University

• Adjunct Associate Professor at UTHealth (University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston)

My past employers include Tibyan AI, Addis Ababa University, OHSU, Trapit, Mayo Clinic, Starkey Laboratories, Honeywell Research, and Medtronic.  For more details (and up-to-date info), check out my LinkedIn profile.

Objectives

I'm trying to empower people to improve society through the wise use of digital data. That means I want to develop a whole ecosystem for data science: business, education, and research. Right now, the thrust is in Libya, where despite an ongoing instability there is an educated and energetic middle-class population, alongside a dearth of businesses in advanced information technologies.

Research Interests

There are some foundational interests that guide the research directions I take on:

• Building up Libya's research capacity and innovation system. Most consider Libya a crisis context, but its academic infrastructure has been singularly stable, and research output is even increasing. I'm trying to enable Libyan researchers to greater productivity by studying what's already been happening in research, and by changing the research ecosystem.

• Ethics and Trustworthiness in AI in International Contexts.  With my experience living in North Africa, I've seen that ethics and trustworthiness (and even usability) of AI is greatly affected by culture and situation, yet these effects are often ignored or poorly understood.

• Clinical information extraction/retrieval.  Much of the important information in electronic medical records (EMR) is in free-text clinical notes rather than form fields.  With clinical NLP, this information may be accessed and used to improve patient care.  I am also interested in implementing the systems that make this information available to clinicians and researchers, hence my interest in information retrieval.

I secured and led an NLM-funded R01 (at OHSU) focused on information retrieval.  I also had an NIAID-funded R21 (with Mayo Clinic) on aggregating patient information over time. 

Teaching

In Spring 2025, I am teaching the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class at Saraya Hamra University.

In Spring 2024, I taught Digital and Soft Skills at Saraya Hamra University, with a goal of building a team of people that I would like to work with.

During COVID-19, I offered some introductory material on Natural Language Processing through Libya AI's Facebook Page and YouTube Channel.

In Spring 2018, I taught ITSC-5C22 Social Network Analysis at Addis Ababa University, and wrote blog post about this very cross-cultural teaching experience.

In Winter Term 2016, I taught CS 562/662 Natural Language Processing at OHSU.  I wrote a blog post about my experiences, advocating for a new teaching framework called techied. 

I have also taught CS 555/655 Analyzing Sequences at OHSU.

Feel free to clone/use/fork my techied repository and build off of it!

Resources

• cTAKES: Apache Clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System.  Originally developed at Mayo Clinic, this is a customizable UIMA-based pipeline that takes clinical text as input and gives lots of different clinical IE/NLP output.

• NLTK: Natural Language Toolkit.  Easy-to-use toolbox for natural language processing, written in Python.  Includes great introductory material for those new to NLP.  Good stuff, but I am not a developer.

• keras: The deep learning toolkit that I typically use, now incorporated into TensorFlow.

Other links

• Computational Semantics in Clinical Text (CSCT), a workshop that I organized.

• Some important wisdom.

• A secondary passion.