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الحمد لله كما ينبغي لجلال وجهه وعظيم سلطانه!

I have just been promoted to Associate Professor rank at our department!

I wouldn’t have achieved this without the help and contribution of every single one of my research group! Without their effort, dedication, understanding, and even dreaming and do’aa, *we* wouldn’t achieve it. And I really mean *we* as I believe the group deserve it as much as I do. The journey wasn’t just mine – I’m deeply grateful to every one of them!

Thanks are also due to all of my (former and current) students, research assistants, and collaborators. This promotion is attributed to a long list of them.

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  Posts

January 26th, 2024

Journal article (led by Fatima) published at SNAM!

My student Fatima Haouari has published her second PhD journal titled “Are authorities denying or supporting? Detecting stance of authorities […]

October 29th, 2023

Gave a “Tahaqqaq” invited talk at Doha Data Forum!

I have given an invited talk titled "Tahaqqaq: A Real-Time System for Assisting Twitter Users in Arabic Claim Verification" at [...]
September 22nd, 2023

Gave “Research Issues You MUST Know” graduate seminar at CAS!

I have given an invited talk titled “Research Issues You MUST Know!” as a Graduate Seminar at the Environmental Sciences […]

September 18th, 2023

Gave a “10 Years of Research at QU” invited talk at CENG

I have given an invited talk titled “10 Years of Research at QU: 10 Lessons Learned” at the Sharing Experience […]

July 10th, 2023

Gave a “Research Ethics” short online lecture!

I have given a short lecture titled “Scientific Publishing and Unethical Practices” through my participation as a keynote speaker in […]

June 13th, 2023

Received Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research!

الحمد لله كثيرا على فضله ونعمه … I’m honored to receive the “Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research” from the […]

June 3rd, 2023

Journal article (led by Watheq) published at IP&M

My student Watheq Mansour has published his journal article titled “This is Not New! Spotting Previously-Verified Claims over Twitter” at […]

May 22nd, 2023

Dr. Reem Suwaileh distinctly defended her PhD!

I’m very pleased and proud that my PhD student Reem Suwaileh has successfully passed her dissertation defense yesterday without modifications — congratulations […]

April 26th, 2023

A new PostDoc position available

Qatar University (QU) is seeking applications for a postdoctoral researcher position for the development of a new automated Arabic essay […]

April 21st, 2023

Journal article (led by Fatima) published at IP&M!

My student Fatima Haouari has published her first PhD journal titled “Who can verify this? Finding authorities for rumor verification […]

April 1st, 2023

Tahaqqaq demo paper accepted at SIGIR!

Tahaqqaq, our real-time system for assisting Twitter users in Arabic claim verification has just been accepted at SIGIR 2023, the […]

March 16th, 2023

Journal article (led by Reem) published at IP&M!

A new journal article led by my PhD student Reem Suwaileh has been published at Information Processing & Management (IP&M) […]

March 15th, 2023

Presenting “Tahaqqaq” at AlJazeera’s “AI in Media” conference!

Our team has represented Qatar University in AlJazeera’s “AI in Media” conference held today. We presented our “Tahaqqaq” application, which […]

January 13th, 2023

Journal article (led by Marwa) published at PeerJ CS!

My PhD student Marwa Essam has published her first journal article titled “Unsupervised query reduction for efficient yet effective news […]

January 3rd, 2023

Authority finding: New exciting shared task!

Authority Finding in Arabic Twitter is a new and exciting shared task organized by my PhD student Fatima Haouari along […]

December 27th, 2022

Dr. Rana Malhas distinctly defended her PhD!

My student Rana Malhas has become my 2nd-ever graduated PhD after distinctly defending her PhD dissertation titled “Arabic Question Answering […]

December 27th, 2022

Zien defended her MSc thesis successfully!

Congratulations to my student Zien Sheikh Ali for successfully defending her MSc thesis with no modifications. Great job! The thesis […]

December 13th, 2022

Short paper (led by Fatima) accepted at ECIR 2023!

A new short paper is accepted at The 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023). The paper is led […]

July 26th, 2022

Full paper accepted at ICWSM 2023!

I’m pleased to announce that my full paper titled “Catch Me If You Can: Deceiving Stance Detection and Geotagging Models […]

June 22nd, 2022

اختتام مسابقة “إجابة الأسئلة من القرآن الكريم” البحثية

لا أجمل أبدا ولا أجل ولا أنفع من عمل يخدم كتاب الله ولو بكلمة! أنعم الله علي وطلبتي (بفريق bigIR) […]

June 6th, 2022

Journal article (led by Reem) accepted at IJDRR!

My PhD student Reem Suwaileh just got her first 1st-author journal article accepted! “When a Disaster Happens, We Are Ready: […]

May 22nd, 2022

Dr. Maram Hasanain — my first PhD graduate !!!

I don’t think there is a more pleasant moment in the academic life of a professor than the graduation of […]

April 26th, 2022

Done with ML course — all lectures available on Youtube!

الحمد لله أن أكرمني بالأمس بإتمام تدريس مادة “تعلم الآلة” (Machine Learning) لهذا الفصل الدراسي بجامعة قطر ورفع وإتاحة كل […]

April 13th, 2022

New 3-year NPRP grant accepted !!!

الحمد لله حمدا كثيرا على نعمه وفضله I’m very pleased (and excited!) to announce that I just got a new […]

March 27th, 2022

بتوقيت القدس!

حين تتلقى دعوة “بتوقيت القدس” لابد أن تلبي النداء! سعدت بتقديم ورشة “ماذا يعني أن تكون طالب دكتوراة؟” لطلبة الدكتوراة […]

March 13th, 2022

ورشة عمل “ماذا يعني أن تكون طالب دكتوراة؟” — متاحة الآن عبر يوتيوب

استمتعت كثيرا بلقائي أمس مع عدد من الشباب والباحثين العرب المهتمين بالدكتوراة من خلال ورشة عمل “ماذا يعني أن تكون […]

March 5th, 2022

ورشة مفتوحة بالعربية بعنوان “ماذا يعني أن تكون طالب دكتوراة؟”

بإذن الله تعالي سأقدم ورشة عمل عبر الإنترنت مفتوحة للجميع *باللغة العربية* بعنوان “ماذا يعني أن تكون طالب دكتوراة؟” لمن […]

January 22nd, 2022

Organizing a new Qur’an QA shared task at OSACT 2022!

Are you looking for a nice research problem to work on for your project or thesis? Are you interested in […]

January 9th, 2022

Teaching ML to undergrads this Fall!

I’m teaching undergrad Machine Learning course this semester & will make all lectures (3/week) available on YouTube over time (إن […]

December 13th, 2021

Fatima passed her PhD candidacy exam!

I’m very pleased to see my PhD student Fatima Haouari  passing her candidacy exam and ready to continue her well-planned […]

November 25th, 2021

Watheq defended his MSc thesis!

I’m very pleased to see my co-supervised student Watheq Mansour defending his MSc thesis titled “Did I see it Before? […]

November 19th, 2021

Full paper accepted at ECIR 2022!

I’m Proud of my MSc student Watheq Mansour who got his first *first-author* full paper titled “Did I see it […]

November 2nd, 2021

Got “Best Reviewer Award” at CIKM 2021!

I’m honored and proud to receive a “Best Reviewer Award” at the prestigious CIKM 2021, which should also definitely go […]

October 27th, 2021

Gave “What’s AI?” short talk at opening of AI organization at QU

I’m honored and excited to give a short “What’s AI?” talk at the opening ceremony of the new “exciting” AI […]

September 13th, 2021

Journal article accepted at JASIST!

It took my PhD student Maram Hasanain about 2 years of perseverance to eventually become a JASIST ‘s first author! […]

June 11th, 2021

Gave an intensive online IR course (in Arabic) for first time !

 (Information Retrieval) بحمد لله وفضله وهداه أتممت (وفريق العمل) تدريس دورة استرجاع المعلومات المكثفة باللغة العربية (للمرة الأولى) والتي استغرقت […]

May 7th, 2021

My senior students got “2nd Best CS Senior Project” in 2021 !

My senior students whom I supervised has achieved the second place among the best CS Senior Project for the academic […]

April 28th, 2021

Participated in QU podcast about “AI and the Future of Humans”!

I enjoyed a lot my participation in a QU podcast about “AI and the Future of Humans” with my colleagues […]

April 19th, 2021

Won the Best Paper Award at WANLP 2021 !!!

I’m really happy (and proud!) that three of my PhD students, Fatima Haouari, Maram Hasanain, and Reem Suwaileh, have won […]

April 9th, 2021

Gave an *Arabic* talk titled “Arabic IR: Tasks, Resources, and Challenges” at AAIS

سعدت للغاية بأن أتيحت لي الفرصة لتقديم نبذة سريعة باللغة العربية (لأول مرة!) عن مجال تخصصي بالقمة العربية للذكاء الاصطناعي […]

April 3rd, 2021

Marwa got “Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award” at ECIR 2021 !!!

I’m VERY PROUD of my PhD student Marwa Essam who got the “Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award” for her PhD […]

February 2nd, 2021

Gave “AI 101” talk at QU Computing Club!

I gave an open “AI 101” talk today at QU Computing Club, covering: – Where is AI? – What can […]

January 16th, 2021

Teaching Big Data course, lectures available on YouTube

I’m teaching Big Data Analytics graduate course this semester and will make all lecture videos available on YouTube over time […]

January 15th, 2021

Teaching IR course, lectures available on YouTube

I’m teaching Information Retrieval graduate course this semester and will make all lecture videos available on YouTube over time here.

November 24th, 2020

Marwa defended her PhD proposal successfully!

Happy to announce that my PhD student Marwa Essam is now a PhD candidate! She successfully defended her PhD proposal […]

September 30th, 2020

Full paper accepted at COLING 2020!

Pleased to see the first full paper of my PhD student Reem Suwaileh, titled “Are We Ready for this Disaster? […]

September 24th, 2020

Journal article published at “Journal of AI Research” (JAIR)!

Our article titled “Annotator Rationales for Labeling Tasks in Crowdsourcing” is finally published at “Journal of AI Research” (JAIR), with […]

September 10th, 2020

Gave my “What it means to be a PhD Student …” workshop at HBKU!

Gave my “What it means to be a PhD Student …” workshop at HBKU, hosted by college of Islamic Studies! […]

August 19th, 2020

Teaching AI course this semester, with recorded lectures on YouTube

I’m teaching “Artificial Intelligence” undergraduate course this semester and will make all lecture videos available on YouTube over time here.

July 26th, 2020

Gave “What it means to be a PhD Student” Workshop at EgyptScholars

Gave my “What it means to be a PhD student” workshop in Arabic hosted at Egypt Scholars Platform! This is […]

July 16th, 2020

Short paper accepted at CIKM 2020!

The paper of my PhD student Marwa Essam titled “Why is That a Background Article? A Qualitative Analysis of Relevance […]

July 16th, 2020

Full paper accepted at ICWSM 2021!

Our full paper titled “Embeddings-Based Clustering for Target Specific Stances: The Case of a Polarized Turkey” has just been accepted […]

July 10th, 2020

QU ranked 1st in IR in the Arab world in CSRankings (2010-2020)!

Honored to contribute in making Qatar University listed among top 150 institutes in Information Retrieval area and top 400 institutes in Computer […]

July 4th, 2020

Gave “What it means to be a PhD Student” Workshop at PRIS’20

I have given, in Arabic, a workshop titled “What it means to be a PhD Student” at Phi Research and […]

May 29th, 2020

FakeDet project is featured in QNRF newsletter!

Our ongoing NPRP project “Early Detection of Fake News over Arabic Social Media” (FakeDet) is featured in QNRF newsletter “Research […]

April 20th, 2020

Gave a Webinar about our new ArCOV-19 dataset!

I gave a webinar (the first ever I give online!) about our newly introduced COVID-19 Twitter Arabic dataset called “ArCOV-19”. The […]

April 14th, 2020

ArCOV-19 dataset released & paper online!

Our newly-curated dataset, ArCOV-19 has just been released here and associated ArXiv paper is online here. ArCOV-19 is an Arabic […]

February 12th, 2020

bigIR website is up!

The website of my research group bigIR is finally up and running! Check out our mission, activities, publications, and achievements! […]

January 21st, 2020

Data Science lectures on YouTube

I’m recording my Data Science lectures and making them available on YouTube as a first-time experience. All lectures will be […]

December 8th, 2019

Reem is a PhD Candidate!

My student Reem Suwaileh has just passed her PhD candidacy exam and became a PhD Candidate! Examined by Dr. Ingmar […]

December 3rd, 2019

Sara defended her MSc thesis!

My MSc student Sara Al-Rasbi has just passed her thesis MSc defense **without modifications** — one of few cases to […]

November 18th, 2019

Gave a keynote talk at “Bias & Misinformation” Workshop, SocInfo 2019!

I gave a keynote talk at “Bias & Misinformation” workshop at SocInfo 2019 that is held in Doha. The talk […]

November 13th, 2019

Ranked 2nd at TREC News 2019!

The work of my PhD student Marwa Essam, who participated for the first time in TREC 2019, has been ranked […]

November 6th, 2019

Gave “What it means to be a PhD Student” Workshop

I have given a new workshop titled “What it means to be a PhD Student” targeting current and prospective PhD […]

August 27th, 2019

Fatima awarded GSRA grant!

Fatima Haouari, a member of our research group, has just been awarded GSRA grant from QNRF to financially support her […]

March 28th, 2019

Gave “Research Issues You MUST Know!” Talk at QU!

I have given a talk titled “Research Issues You MUST Know!” to QU students (as a seminar in the series […]

February 13th, 2019

Gave “Machine Learning 101” workshop to EE students

I gave a short “Machine Learning 101” workshop to the female students of the Electrical Engineering department at QU. I […]

January 18th, 2019

bigIR Twitter account is up!

A twitter account for our research group bigIR has just been online! The account will share our group’s news and […]

November 20th, 2018

Got new NPRP research grant about “Fake News Detection”!

It has just been announced that my submitted NPRP proposal titled “Early Detection of Fake News over Arabic Social Media” […]

August 15th, 2018

Promoted to Associate Professor!

الحمد لله كما ينبغي لجلال وجهه وعظيم سلطانه! I have just been promoted to Associate Professor rank at our department! […]

August 15th, 2018

Reem awarded GSRA grant!

Reem Suwaileh, a member of our research group, has just been awarded GSRA grant from QNRF to financially support her […]

August 7th, 2018

2 papers accepted at CIKM 2018 !!

Our group has two papers just accepted at CIKM 2018! A full paper with Mucahid, Maram, and Matt (17% acceptance […]

July 25th, 2018

Full paper accepted at DESIRES’18 !

Our full paper titled “Mix and Match: Collaborative Expert-Crowd Judging for Building Test Collections Accurately and Affordably” led by Mucahid Kutlu […]

June 5th, 2018

Reem defended her MSc thesis with distinction!

My student Reem Suwaileh has successfully defended her MSc thesis titled “On the Relevance Filtering for Real-time Summarization” and got […]

May 22nd, 2018

Received “Excellence in Services” award from our CSE dept.!

Received the Excellence in Services award from Computer Science and Engineering Dept. at Qatar University for the academic year 2017/2018.

April 12th, 2018

Full paper accepted at SIGIR 2018 !!!

Our full paper titled “What can Rationales behind Relevance Judgments Tell Us about Assessor Disagreement?” led by our group members […]

March 29th, 2018

Full paper accepted at HComp 2018!

Our full paper titled “Your Behavior Signals Your Reliability: Modeling Crowd Behavioral Traces to Ensure Quality Relevance Annotations” led by […]

March 26th, 2018

BroDyn’18 workshop @ ECIR was a success!

With about 20 attendees, BroDyn’18 workshop “the 1st International Workshop on Analysis of Broad Dynamic Topics over Social Media” was […]

March 16th, 2018

Full paper accepted at VLDB!

Our full paper titled “LA3: A Scalable Linkand LocalityAware Linear AlgebraBased Graph Analytics System” has been accepted at VLDB 2018! […]

December 21st, 2017

Our IRJ article is now online!

Our IRJ journal article “EveTAR: building a large-scale multi-task test collection over Arabic tweets” has been published online here. Download […]

December 13th, 2017

Paper accepted at LREC 2018!

A paper has been accepted at LREC 2018, titled “DART: A Large Dataset of Dialectal Arabic Tweets” with my senior […]

December 11th, 2017

Journal article accepted at IRJ!

Our journal article titled “EveTAR: Building a Large-Scale Multi-Task Test Collection over Arabic Tweets” has been finally accepted for publication […]

October 17th, 2017

Arabic Processing Workshop accepted at LREC 2018!

Our proposed workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT) was accepted at LREC 2018. The workshop is co-organized […]

October 12th, 2017

BroDyn workshop accepted at ECIR’18!

Our proposed workshop on Analysis of Broad Dynamic Topics over Social Media (BroDyn) was accepted at ECIR 2018. The workshop […]

September 14th, 2017

Another journal article accepted at IP&M!

Our journal article titled “Intelligent Topic Selection for Low-Cost Information Retrieval Evaluation: A New Perspective on Deep vs. Shallow Judging” […]

September 12th, 2017

Fact-Checking Lab accepted at CLEF 2018!

Our lab proposal titled “Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Political Debates” has been accepted at CLEF 2018. The […]

August 15th, 2017

Journal article accepted at IP&M!

Our journal article titled “Query Performance Prediction for Microblog Search” has been finally accepted for publication at Information Processing and Management (IP&M) […]

June 20th, 2017

Elected as coordinator of Data Science group at CSE dept!

I have been elected as the coordinator of the Data Science research group at the Computer Science and Engineering Dept […]

June 6th, 2017

Maram Hasanain: SIGIR Student Liaison!

My Ph.D student Maram Hasanain has been selected as SIGIR Student Liaison (for the Middle East region) among only 6 students worldwide. […]

May 18th, 2017

Gave a “How to Give a (Research) Talk” talk at QU!

I have given a “How to Give a (Research) Talk” talk at the CSE dept seminar series today at QU. […]

February 13th, 2017

Teaching Data Science course this fall!

I’m proud to be the first to teach a “Data Science” course in Qatar this Fall at Qatar University! Starting […]

February 3rd, 2017

My students win best 3 posters at Women in Data Science (WiDS) in Qatar event !!

Reem Suwaileh (my MSc student) and Maram Hasanain (my PhD student) won the first and the first-repeated places in the poster […]

January 9th, 2017

In the news: Our historic TREC success!

Our historic 1st rank at TREC 2016 was featured heavily in the local news today! Articles were written in Gulf […]

January 8th, 2017

“QU at TREC .. A Success Story”: an article at CSE newsletter!

I have contributed an article that is featured in the first issue of CSE newsletter about our team’s success story […]

December 31st, 2016

Maram Hasanain: SIGIR Ambassador at ACM Turing Award 50-Years Celebration

My perspective PhD student Maram Hasanain has been selected among 10 students from all over the world to represent ACM […]

December 2nd, 2016

Demo accepted at ECIR 2017!

A demo paper has been accepted at ECIR 2017, titled “QweetFinder: Real-time Finding and Filtering of Question Tweets” with Ameer Albahem […]

November 30th, 2016

In the news: our HComp best paper!

Our HComp 2016 best paper award has been featured in a news release: https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/news/professor-lease-wins-hcomp-2016-best-paper-award  

November 22nd, 2016

Joined IP&M Editorial Board!

I have been invited to join the editorial board of Elsevier Information Processing & Management Journal (IF = 1.397), one […]

November 18th, 2016

Gave real-time summarization talk at TREC!

I have given the QU talk of real-time summarization track at TREC today. You can find the slides here.

November 17th, 2016

Gave LiveQA talk at TREC!

I have given the QU talk of LiveQA track at TREC today. You can find the slides here.

November 16th, 2016

Our team achieved a historic 1st rank at TREC 2016 !!!

Our bigIR (representing QU) team has been ranked first at TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) 2016 international research competition in the […]

November 1st, 2016

Best paper award at HCOMP 2016!

Our paper titled “Why Is That Relevant? Collecting Annotator Rationales for Relevance Judgments” has been awarded “Best Paper Award” at […]

October 30th, 2016

Our team selected to present at TREC RTS 2016!

We have been “selected” by the organizers to present our work at TREC-2016 Real-time Summarization track!

October 6th, 2016

Gave a talk at HBKU!

I have given a talk titled “Research Issues You MUST know!” at “Cybersecurity Policy, Management and IT ethics” graduate course […]

September 18th, 2016

Appointed as manager of Data Science area at KINDI

I was appointed as a manager (along with Dr. Noora Fetais) of the newly-added “Data Science” research focus area at […]

September 7th, 2016

Our team invited to present at TREC LiveQA 2016!

Due to our “high performance” in TREC-2016 LiveQA track, we have been “invited” by the organizers to present our work […]

August 3rd, 2016

Full paper accepted @ HComp 2016 !

Our full paper titled “Why Is That Relevant? Collecting Annotator Rationales for Relevance Judgments” co-authored with Tyler Mcdonnell and Matt Lease (University […]

July 18th, 2016

EveTAR is released!

Our test collection for Arabic event detection in Twitter has just been released. Please check it out here!

May 17th, 2016

Gave a talk at SMNews Workshop, ICWSM’16

I have given a talk at Social Media in the Newsroom (SMNews) workshop held at ICWSM’16 conference in Cologne, Germany, […]

May 14th, 2016

Our papers @ SIGIR 2016

Hind Almerekhi, Maram Hasanain, and Tamer Elsayed. EveTAR: A New Test Collection for Event Detection in Arabic Tweets. Proceedings of […]

April 27th, 2016

2 students got SIGIR travel grants!

Reem Suwaileh (MSc student) and Maram Hasanain (PhD student) have been selected to get SIGIR travel grant to support their […]

April 5th, 2016

Gave a talk at “Big Data Management” workshop at QU!

I gave a talk titled “bigIR: When Big Data meets Information Retrieval” at “Big Data Management” workshop organized at QU.

March 30th, 2016

2 short papers accepted at SIGIR 2016 !!!

Our group got 2 short papers accepted at ACM SIGIR conference (the top conference in our IR field) this year for […]

March 11th, 2016

Full paper accepted at SMNews workshop at ICWSM 2016!

We got a full paper titled “What Questions Do Journalists Ask on Twitter?” accepted at the Social Media in the […]

February 22nd, 2016

Hind defended her thesis!

My MSc student, Hind Almerekhi, has successfully defended her MSc thesis titled “Building a Test Collection for Significant-Event Detection in […]

December 5th, 2015

Short paper accepted at ECIR 2016!

Our short paper “On the Evaluation of Tweet Timeline Generation Task” (with Walid Magdy (QCRI) and Maram Hasanain) has been accepted at ECIR 2016!

December 3rd, 2015

Talk at AIRS 2015

Gave a talk at AIRS 2015 at Brisbane, Australia on our accepted paper “Detecting Automatically-Generated Arabic Tweets”.

December 3rd, 2015

Best paper award at AIRS-2015!

Got “Best Paper Award” at AIRS 2015 for the paper titled “Improving Tweet Timeline Generation by Predicting Optimal Retrieval Depth” co-authored with my […]

November 24th, 2015

Journal article accepted at IP&M!

My journal article jointly authored with Walid Magdy and titled “Unsupervised Adaptive Microblog Filtering for Broad Dynamic Topics” has finally been accepted […]

November 18th, 2015

Ranked 2nd at TREC-2015 real-time filtering track!

QU team is ranked 2nd at TREC’15 microblog track, real-time filtering task (scenario A) among 14 participating international teams!! The team includes […]

September 2nd, 2015

“Big Data” course approved!

My proposed “Big Data Analytics” PhD course has been approved and is offered in Fall 2015. It’s the first ever […]

September 1st, 2015

New postdoc joining the team!

Mucahid Kutlu has joined my research team as a PostDoc.

June 25th, 2015

Latifa defended her thesis!

My MSc student, Latifa Al-Marri, has successfully defended her MSc thesis titled “Utilizing Hashtags for Microblog Adhoc Retrieval“. Her thesis […]