The Middle East and North Africa Network

NAGLA RIZK

Nagla Rizk is Professor of Economics and Founding Director of the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at the American University in Cairo’s School of Business. Her research area is the economics of knowledge, technology and innovation with emphasis on human development in the digital economy in the Middle East and Africa. Her recent work focuses on the economics of data, AI and inclusion. She is Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Affiliated Faculty at Harvard Law School’s Copyright course, Affiliated Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and Associate Member of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Law, Technology and Society.

Yasser Bahjatt

A computer engineer (KAU, Singularity University at NASA Ames) by training, Yasser is an entrepreneur, co-founder of Yatakhayaloon, author of Yaqteenya: The Old World, co-author of the English additions of best-selling Saudi novels HWJN, Somewhere& Binyameen. First to translate TED talks to Arabic, he was the #1 global TED translator for several months.

Reham Hosny

Reham Hosny is a lecturer at University of Leeds, UK and Minia University, Egypt. She is the author of Al-Barrah [The Announcer], the first Arabic augmented reality and hologram novel, in collaboration with programmer and researcher in University of Leeds Mohamed Nasef (Oct. 2019). She has published widely on the creation, criticism, and translation of electronic literature. Her new book, @arabicelit, will come out in 2020 from Bloomsbury Publishing. She is the director of arabicelit, the first initiative focusing on globalizing Arabic electronic literature in English language. 

Yasmine Moataz Ahmed

Yasmine is a social anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Tunisia and New York. She is currently a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the Core Curriculum Office and the anthropology unit of The American University in Cairo (AUC). She earned her PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, where she conducted an ethnography of the state, through a study of the everyday encounters between citizens and state bureaucracies in rural Egypt. Since 2007, she has been involved in various research projects at The American University in Cairo and the American University of Beirut, and has been an active member of Thimar, a research collective on agriculture, environment and labor in the Arab World. 

mohamed hamama

Currently Mada Masr’s managing editor. Formerly a software developer. A retired dentist. As for the future, maybe an owner of a bakery where he can sell his own bread.

Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely

is a Professor of ophthalmology and a winner of several national and international awards in his profession from prestigious academic institutes as the American Academy of Ophthalmology. He has published many research papers in different international periodicals.Internationally certified trainer from the IBCT and a part-time instructor in the executive education unit of the School of Business at AUC.  Founder of the Minia University Entrepreneurship Center, the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction, and the Attitude Changer initiative. He published three sci-fi novels and wrote several short stories in the genre. He also published the Arab Encyclopedia for Eye Diseases (three volumes so far).

Aya El Sharkawy

Aya is a researcher at the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D), at the American University in Cairo. Currently she is co-editor of A2K4D's blog, and most recently she has been involved in the Speculative Data Futures project which is a series of science-fiction, Arab-futurism, gender centric short stories by women from Egypt, Syria and Palestine. A recurrent interest in her research has been exploring the intersections of visual and cultural discourse. As an Arab woman her education and identity both nuance and constantly challenge the categories to which she ascribes and is subjugated.

Nadine Weheba

Nadine’s research interests are the political economy of Information communication technologies, innovation and development. As part of the Open African Innovation Research Project, of which A2K4D at the American University in Cairo is the North African Hub, she is engaged in research on knowledge governance, openness, collaboration and alternative metrics for innovation in Africa. Nadine also studies the sharing economy and issues of artificial intelligence and inclusion in the context of Egypt, Africa and the region. She received her MSc in development studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London in 2013 and holds a BA in economics from The American University in Cairo.

Dana El Bashbishy

As a member of the New and Emerging Researchers Group (NERG) in the Open African Innovation Research Partnership, Dana is engaged in the research on finding alternative knowledge and innovation metrics in an attempt to better capture and represent the informal innovation in Africa. She also examines different topics such as the sharing economy in Egypt, Artificial Intelligence and development. Dana is also a Teaching Assistant of the Digital Economy: Information Technology and Inclusive Development economics course at the American University in Cairo. Dana holds a BA in Economics from the American University in Cairo. 

NIKOLAOS MAVRIDIS

With a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Nikolaos is an academic and consultant specializing in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. He is the founder and director of the Interactive Robots and Media Lab (IRML), which started as the first robotics research laboratory of the United Arab Emirates, and has served as faculty at numerous institutions, including UAEU, New York University Abu Dhabi and Poly and more. His work, including the Arabic Language Conversational Human-like Robot "Ibn Sina", has reached worldwide publicity.

ImaN Hamam

Iman Hamam teaches Rhetoric and Composition and Film Studies at the American University in Cairo. She has written about Egyptian cinema, experimental film, documentary and mainstream comedies; Arab satellite television; the memorialization of the 6 October war and Cairo's changing urban landscape; the history and development of YA comics in Egypt; and representations of the body, technology and space in Science Fiction and graphic novels. Her research interests include colonialism and the environment in film, popular culture, and fiction.

ASSiA Boundaoui

Assia is an Algerian-American journalist and filmmaker based in Chicago. She has reported for the BBC, NPR, PRI, Al Jazeera, VICE, and CNN. Her feature length debut THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED, a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia's Muslim-American community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. She is currently a fellow with the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where she is iterating her most recent work, the Inverse Surveillance Project.

farah ghazal

Farah is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Fellow at the Access to Knowledge for Development Centre (A2K4D) and an L.L.M student at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Her research interests include feminist theory, public international law, development and Artificial Intelligence. She is currently involved in a research project studying data policies and regulations affecting the development of AI technologies in Egypt and Tunisia.  

Imad H. Elhajj

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the American University of Beirut. Dr. Elhajj is the past chair of IEEE Lebanon Section and a senior member of IEEE. He serves as an ABET program evaluator since 2013. His research interests are at the intersection of robotics, networking, and human machine interfacing with applications in health and environment.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Muhammad is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Washington and a Research Scientist at KenSci, an AI in healthcare company based in Seattle, USA. Muhammad Aurangzeb has published over 50 research papers in machine learning and artificial intelligence. His research is in accountability of Artificial Intelligence, AI in healthcare, and AI from a cross-cultural and ethical perspective. He has a PhD in Computer Science at University of Minnesota and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He also runs the Islam and Science Fiction project. 

Hana Shaltout

Hana is currently a Researcher at the Access to Knowledge for Development Centre, housed at the American University in Cairo. She graduated from the American University in Cairo in 2014 with a B.A. from the Political Science Honours Programme with a specialisation in International Relations. Deciding to pursue a gender studies postgraduate programme, she completed her MSc in Gender, Media, and Culture from the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics and graduated in 2015. Hana currently works primarily on Gender-centric research projects at the Center. Her research interests include alternative knowledge production, artificial intelligence in the Global South, gender studies, and cultural studies.  

Nagham El Houssamy 

Nagham is working at the intersection of knowledge, technology, entrepreneurship and development. She joined the Access to Knowledge for Development Center at the American University in Cairo in June 2012, serving as the North Africa Hub coordinator for The Open African Innovation Research Partnership (Open AIR). Prior to joining A2K4D, Nagham was an Economic Researcher in the Macro-Fiscal Policy Unit at the Egyptian Ministry of Finance. She interned at the ICT Policies Unit of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for West Asia in Beirut. Nagham graduated from The American University in Cairo with an MA in Economics in International Development and a BA in Political Science, specializing in International Law and International Relations, with a minor in Economics.

Mariam Salem

Mariam's research interests are the political economy of data, development, and the politics of gender. She is a researcher at the Access to Knowledge for Development Center at the American University in Cairo and is primarily engaged in the Center's initiatives on Inclusive Internet Governance. Mariam received her BA in Political Science with a specialization in International Law and Political Economy from the American University in Cairo in 2013. She completed her MA in International and Comparative Law from the American University in Cairo in 2019.