Sofiane Abbar

Dr. Sofiane Abbar was a Principal Engineer in the Social Computing department at Qatar Computing Research Institute since 2011. He was leading the Urban Computing activity with a focus on leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques to tackle big mobility challenges related to maps, routing, traffic congestion, urban planning, and city resilience. Dr. Abbar has initiated several projects with public entities in Qatar including the Ministry of Transport and Communication and the Ministry of Interior. He has also developed and deployed into production various large-scale systems such as QARTA which is used by Karwa Taxi Mowasalat and Rafeeq Deliveries to resolve millions of routing requests per week. Dr. Abbar also developed CONTRACE, the first centralized contact tracing system used by the Ministry of Interior, in early April 2020, in an effort to limit the spread of the pandemic in Qatar. Dr. Sofiane Abbar has co-authored over 60 papers and articles in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and acts as PC is several international conferences such as ACM SIGSPATIAL, IEEE MDM, ACM CHI, and AAAI ICWSM. Dr. Sofiane Abbar earned his Ph.D. from the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-En-Yvelines (France) in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs. He graduated as a CS Engineer in 2006 from Ecole Supérieur d’Informatique in Algiers, Algeria.