We are completely surrounded by Recommender systems. If you watch something on Amazon, Netflix or YouTube, you immediately get a list of recommendations on what to watch next. And, it is not just music or videos. You constantly get recommendations on Amazon—people who bought this book also bought this other book. Same goes for restaurant recommendations. Then there are targeted advertisements, a manifestation of similar technology that assesses your personal profile and figures out what to show you.
So, how do these systems work? Personalization is one of the key applications in machine learning with widespread usage across e-commerce, entertainment, production, healthcare and many other industries.
This talk will present recent advances across the personalization industry and demonstrates their practical applications in real case-studies of world-leading online platforms
DATA SCIENCE
I will talk about how telecom companies are monetizing their big data in order to open new revenue streams especially after the telecom industry started facing increasing top-line pressure in their core business due to intense competition from market players, as well as the growing threats from digital-native/OTT players. I will showcase some real use cases that i have personally worked on in Saudi Arabia, and i will give some advice on how telecom operators in Algeria can benefits from their huge amount of data that they collected through time.
Language: English
Talk
The scale and complexity of human behavior traces captured on the web have revolutionized disease tracking, pushing the lag of conventional health surveillance to more real-time “now-casting”.
These signals also provide a rich tableau of the context around people’s health conditions, as well as cultural, social, and personal attitudes which affect their behavior and health-related beliefs. In this talk, I will discuss case studies of different perspectives through which we may detect and track online health misinformation, including rumors around Zika virus, the spread of unproven cancer treatment claims, and the anti-vaccination debate.
We will look at them through the lenses of machine learning for misinformation classification, cohort identification for user stance tracking, and network science for the quantification of the echo chamber effect. We will then discuss how these tools may fit into the larger battle against harmful information.
Language: English
Talk
Google Summer of Code is a Google program that supports opensource software, selected students are paid by Google to contribute to major opensource projects.
In this workshop, I’ll go through my experience, as someone who successfully completed Google Summer of Code 2020, I’ll also provide tips for students who want to maximize their chances of being accepted to the program.
Language: english
Workshop
Social media is the main media users now use to get information and communicate with others. The amount of large data has enriched the field of data science to learn more about human behaviour from their activities online. In this talk, we discuss the field of Computational social science (CSS) that focuses on studying social phenomena with big data to learn about societies and individuals. Examples of CSS studies from the Arab region are presented including social, religious and political topics.
Language: english
Talk
The era of the automobile has seriously degraded the quality of urban life through costly travel and visible environmental effects. A new urban planning paradigm must be at the heart of our road map for the years to come, the one where, within minutes, inhabitants can access their basic living needs by bike or on foot. In this talk, I’ll recount some data-driven projects we conducted at QCRI to improve general mobility in the fast-growing city of Doha and show how these projects developed into real solutions used by thousands of taxi and delivery drivers for routing, mapping, and travel time estimation. In the second part, I’ll focus on some novel insights into the interplay between the distributions of facilities and populations in various cities that maximize accessibility over the existing road networks.
Language: English
Talk