1. Data Aurora in the MENA Region
ACHIEVEMENTS, OPPORTUNITIES, AND CHALLENGES

2. FOUNDERS Here at the AI for Social Good Event
BAHIA HALAWI
@halawiBahia
ALI SROUR
@SrourAli0

3. Content Main Achievements Mena Challenges-landscape assessment
Beirut-micro challenges
Opportunities

4. 1. As Data Scientists in the MENA Region

5. Data Science and Innovation projects since 2013:
Business Intelligence field
Passion for innovation
Social media/specifically twitter real time follow up
How it Started
Innovation
BigData hype
Data Science
Into the Hype
Success stories in major industries
Early adoption
Working with non-techs
Training CSOs and students
Introducing non-traditional working techniques
Real projects

6. Media/ Politics/ Campaigning
Main Achievements
Media/ Politics/ Campaigning
Data Journalism/Automated storytelling Techniques
Youth/ Unemployment/Capacity building
Social Network Analytics/ Opinion Mining
Retail
Gas and Oil
Marketing

7. Loyalty Card Analysis to derive purchasing power
Increase revenues through new cross selling and upselling methods
Enhance Brand Reputation by detecting influencers
Real-time targeted & contextual promotions                     
Personalized product display

8. Merkel and Grexit: Natural Language Processing Techniques, Named Entity Recognition and Co-occurrence modeling to compare differences in user behaviors over different platforms

9. Identifying Key Players in the Greek Crisis and the sentiment of the co-mentioned figures

10. Bogota Instagram Data to discover people’s interests and trending topics
Extract thousands of Instagram images in Bogota city for a specific timeframe. Then we used graph visualization algorithms to detect communities and see co-occurrence of hashtags together. .

11. The story of falling oil prices: Social Network Analysis
The person co-occurrence network of Oil & Gas news coverage 6 months before the Oil prices dropped (November 2013 till June 2014)
More than 200 different news articles and which co-occurred with at least one other name in 180 or more articles were retained, yielding a network diagram of 91 names and 184 connections.

12. Job Portals: AI for non-traditional data modeling, analysis and visualizations

13. In one of our ongoing projects, we are working on opinion mining and deriving proxy socio-economic indicators

14. In one of our ongoing projects, we are working on opinion mining and deriving proxy socio-economic indicators

15. 3.
Major Challenges
Assessing the Mena data science landscape

16. Challenges and how we approached it
Data = fear/rejection
Strengthen relationships and work on building trust with managers
Internal competition and fear of being replaced
Team work and clarifying intentions
Gender bias
Enforcing quotas
Training events are run for reputation/ little benefit
Awareness
Each department/team wants credit for achievements
Leaders should be strict to reach final goal

17. Micro Challenges in Beirut
Approach
Security and safety
DON’T give up
Consumption based economy
Pilot projects and prototypes outside the country or on a small scale
Low wages/income
Project based contracts
Refugees
Include them in our plans and teams If they are skilled enough

18. 4.
Opportunities

19. Opportunities Arab youth are aware and capable of competing
Academically powerful and great skills
Major research centers and communities
Interdisciplinary projects
Refugees and Resetlement
children and youth of countries with wars (capacity building, services, rules and regulations along with smart urban space strategies)

20. Collaborations for Social Good3
We are open to share our knowledge and skills to develop any open source platform 1 2
We are passionate about natural language processing, especially projects related to the Arabic Language
We look forward to collaborate on any data driven-innovative project that serves and empowers users

21. Thanks!