I am a speech scientist, with a passion for analyzing and understanding human conversation. I authored more than 40 papers for different speech and NLP challenges, with the main focus on speech overlaps, turn-takings, speech discourse, code-switching, along with the explainability of the speech modules. My work also includes studying the potential of language models for its linguistic task understanding capabilities. I am currently working as a scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute. I got my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi, from the University of Trento in 2017. I worked on analyzing different Turn-Taking behavior in the context of spontaneous and in-vivo human conversations while handling discourse of overlapping speech and the function of silence in the conversation. I worked in many EU-funded projects to pursue the understanding of human-human/machine interaction. I am currently involved in enriching the ArabicSpeech Portal with an aim to bridge the gap between the standard and dialectal resources and make Arabic speech technologies available for all.
Research Scientist
QCRI: Qatar Computing Research Institute