Publications

Rapid disaster damage assessment using deep adversarial sliced Wasserstein domain adaptation

Fatma AlNaimi , Abdulaziz Al-Homaid , Ferda Ofli , Abdelkader Baggag
Neural Computing and Applications (2026)

DisasterVQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Dataset for Disaster Scenes

Aisha Al-Mohannadi , Ayisha Firoz , Yin Yang , Muhammad Imran , Ferda Ofli
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (2026)

Agentic Engagement with Educational AI Chatbots Among Pre-service Teachers: A Mixed-Method Study in Qatar

Youmen Chaaban , Soon-Gyo Jung , Bernard J Jansen
Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (2026)

ISilDR: Isometric Seriation-based Dimensionality Reduction for Visual Cluster Analysis

Rene Cutura , Sophie Sadler , Quynh Quang Ngo , Michaël Aupetit , Michael Sedlmair
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2026)

From Priming Modalities to Educational AI Chatbot Engagement: A Study of 67 Learners

Trang Xuan , Joni Salminen , Ilkka Kaate , Farhan Ahmed , Danial Amin , Rajat Patil , Soon-Gyo Jung , Jinan Y. Azem , Bernard J. Jansen
International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction (2026)

Fanar 2.0: Arabic Generative AI Stack

FANAR TEAM, Ummar Abbas, Mohammad Shahmeer Ahmad, Minhaj Ahmad, Abdulaziz Al-Homaid, Anas Al-Nuaimi, Enes Altinisik, Ehsaneddin Asgari, Sanjay Chawla, Shammur Chowdhury, Fahim Dalvi, Kareem Darwish, Nadir Durrani, Mohamed Elfeky, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Mohamed Eltabakh, Asim Ersoy, Masoomali Fatehkia, Mohammed Qusay Hashim, Majd Hawasly, Mohamed Hefeeda, Mus’ab Husaini, Keivin Isufaj, Soon-Gyo Jung, Houssam Lachemat, Ji Kim Lucas, Abubakr Mohamed, Tasnim Mohiuddin, Basel Mousi, Hamdy Mubarak, Ahmad Musleh, Mourad Ouzzani, Amin Sadeghi, Husrev Taha Sencar, Mohammed Shinoy, Omar Sinan, Yifan Zhang
arXiv:2603.16397 (2026)

AI representing personas representing user groups: Applying the agency theory to examine interaction challenges of conversational personas as decision-making tools

Joni Salminen, Soon-Gyo Jung, Ilkka Kaate, Trang Thi Thu Xuan, Jinan Y. Azem, Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Danial Amin, Bernard J. Jansen
Decision Support Systems (2025)

Uncertainty-Aware LLMs Fail to Flag Misleading Contexts

Tianyi Zhou, Johanne Medina, Sanjay Chawla
NeurIPS 2025 – Reliable ML Workshop (2025)

Examining Student Teachers’ Agency in an AI-Supported Learning Environment: Q Methodology Research

Youmen Chaaban, Soon-Gyo Jung, Johanne Medina, Jinan Y. Azem, Joni Salminen & Bernard J. Jansen
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (2025)

Cipherbot: An AI-Powered Educational Assistant for Conversational Q&A About Course Material

Jinan Azem , Soon-Gyo Jung , Johanne Medina , Kholoud K. Aldous , Joni Salminen , Bernard J Jansen
International Conference on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM) (2025)

Investigating the Usability of an Educational AI Chatbot by Middle School Teachers and Students for Enhanced Learning

Kholoud Khalil Aldous , Joni Salminen , Soon-gyo Jung , Jinan Y. Azem , Johanne Medina , Salar M. Khan , Amani Alabed , Bernard J. Jansen
International Conference on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM) (2025)

Explaining the role of Intrinsic Dimensionality in Adversarial Training

Enes Altinisik, Safa Messaoud, Husrev Taha Sencar, Hassan Sajjad, Sanjay Chawla
ICML (2025)

What is User Engagement?: A Systematic Review of 241 Research Articles in Human-Computer Interaction and Beyond

Bernard J. Jansen, Kathleen Guan, Joni Salminen, Khloud Aldous, Soon-gyo Jung
Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) (2025)

Cipherbot: A Learning Platform for AI-Augmented Education

Soon-Gyo Jung, Johanne Medina, Kholoud Aldous, Jinan Azem, Joni Salminen, Bernard J Jansen
Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference (2025)

Distortion-aware Brushing for Reliable Cluster Analysis in Multidimensional Projections

Hyeon Jeon, Michael Aupetit, Soohyun Lee, Kwon Ko, Youngtaek Kim, Ghulam Jilani Quadri
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2025)

AI-Driven Disaster Response and Displacement Monitoring

Noora Al-Emadi, Muhammad Imran, Yin Yang, Ingmar Weber, Fabjan Lashi, Gaia Rigodanza, Ivana Hajžmanová, Ferda Ofli.
Communications of the ACM (2025)

Can LLMs Detect Their Confabulations? Estimating Reliability in Uncertainty-Aware Language Models

Tianyi Zhou, Johanne Medina, Sanjay Chawla
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 40(44), 38164-38172.

ArnoldiGCL: Graph Contrastive Learning via Learnable Arnoldi-Based Guided Spectral Chebyshev Polynomial Filters

Mustafa Coşkun, Abdelkader Baggag, Mehmet Koyutürk
Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2025)

When Personas Talk to You: Evaluating the Evolution of User Personas from Static Profiles to Conversational User Interfaces

Ilkka Kaate, Joni Salminen, Soon-Gyo Jung, Trang Thi Thu Xuan, Jinan Y Azem, João M Santos, Bernard J Jansen
Proceedings of the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (2025)

Machine Learning-Driven Insights and Predictions for CO2 Adsorption in Metal-Organic Frameworks

Skander Charni, Raeesh Muhammad, Abdulkarem I. Amhamed, Brahim Aissa, Halima Bensmail
International Conference on Thermal Engineering (ICTEA) (2025)

Benchmarking Object Detectors under Real-World Distribution Shifts in Satellite Imagery

Sara Al-Emadi, Yin Yang, Ferda Ofli.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2025)

Comprehensive Analysis of Rare Variants Associated with Genetic Predisposition to Non-BRCA Familial Breast Cancer Among Arabs

Ehsan Ullah, Hikmat Abdel-Razeq, Sana Bentebbal, Abdullah Shaar, Nehad Alajez, Mohamad Saad, Julie V. Decock
Clinical Cancer Research (2025)

Evaluating Robustness of LLMs on Crisis-Related Microblogs across Events, Information Types, and Linguistic Features

Muhammad Imran, Abdul Wahab Ziaullah, Kai Chen, Ferda Ofli.
WWW 2025 – Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference (2025)

Human-centred artificial intelligence in progressive education: unravelling the benefits and challenges in Qatar’s HEIs

Bernard J. Jansen, Soon-gyo Jung, Ali Farooq, Joni Salminen, Kholoud Aldous, Pilira Stella Msefula, Amani Alabed, Salar M. Khan, Richard O’Kennedy
The Future of Education Policy in the State of Qatar, Singapore: Springer Nature (2025)

What is User Engagement?: A Systematic Review of 241 Research Articles in Human-Computer Interaction and Beyond

Bernard J Jansen, Kathleen W Guan, Joni Salminen, Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Soon-Gyo Jung
Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) (2025)

HCT-QA: A Benchmark for Question Answering on Human-Centric Tables

Mohammad Shahmeer Ahmad, Zan A Naeem, Michael Aupetit, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Mohamed Eltabakh, Xiasong Ma, Mourad Ouzzani, Chaoyi Ruan
arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.20047 (2025)

Measuring the Validity of Clustering Validation Datasets

Hyeon Jeon, Michael Aupetit, DongHwa Shin, Aeri Cho, Seokhyeon Park, Jinwook Seo
IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2025)

Genome‐Wide Association Study for Resting Electrocardiogram in the Qatari Population Identifies 6 Novel Genes and Validates Novel Polygenic Risk Scores

Nahin Khan, Abdullah Shaar, Khalid Kunji, Atlas Khan, Mohamed Elshrif, Mohammed Bashir, Mohammed Thamer Ali, Ayman Al Haj Zen, Krzysztof Kiryluk, Georges Nemer, Akl C. Fahed, Mohamad Saad
Journal of the American Heart Association (2025)

Tisslet: Tissues-based Learning Estimation for Transcriptomics

Ahmed Miloudi, Aisha Al-Qahtani, Thamanna Hashir, Mohamed Chikri, Halima Bensmail
BMC bioinformatics (2025)

Fanar: An Arabic-Centric Multimodal Generative AI Platform

Fanar Team: Ummar Abbas, Mohammad Shahmeer Ahmad, Firoj Alam, Enes Altinisik, Ehsannedin Asgari, Yazan Boshmaf, Sabri Boughorbel, Sanjay Chawla, Shammur Chowdhury, Fahim Dalvi, Kareem Darwish, Nadir Durrani, Mohamed Elfeky, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Mohamed Eltabakh, Masoomali Fatehkia, Anastasios Fragkopoulos, Maram Hasanain, Majd Hawasly, Mus’ab Husaini, Soon-Gyo Jung, Ji Kim Lucas, Walid Magdy, Safa Messaoud, Abubakr Mohamed, Tasnim Mohiuddin, Basel Mousi, Hamdy Mubarak, Ahmad Musleh, Zan Naeem, Mourad Ouzzani, Dorde Popovic, Amin Sadeghi, Husrev Taha Sencar, Mohammed Shinoy, Omar Sinan, Yifan Zhang, Ahmed Ali, Yassine El Kheir, Xiaosong Ma, Chaoyi Ruan
arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.13944 (2025)

PersonaCraft: Leveraging language models for data-driven persona development

Soon Gyo Jung, Joni Salminen, Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Bernard J. Jansen
 International Journal of Human Computer Studies (2025)

RetClean: Retrieval-Based Data Cleaning Using LLMs and DataLakes

Zan Ahmad Naeem, Mohammad Shahmeer Ahmad, Mohamed Y Eltabakh, Mourad Ouzzani, Nan Tang
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2024)

S²AC: Energy-Based Reinforcement Learning with Stein Soft Actor Critic

Safa Messaoud, Billel Mokeddem, Zhenghai Xue, Linsey Pang, Bo An, Haipeng Chen, Sanjay Chawla
ICLR (2024)

(Won Deployed Application Award) Flood Insights: Integrating Remote and Social Sensing Data for Flood Exposure, Damage, and Urgent Needs Mapping.

 Zainab Akhtar, Umair Qazi, Aya El-Sakka, Rizwan Sadiq, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran.
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2024)

Genetic Susceptibility to Arrhythmia Phenotypes in a Middle Eastern Cohort of 14,259 Whole-Genome Sequenced Individuals

Fatima Qafoud , Mohamed Elshrif , Khalid Kunji , Asma Althani , Amar Salam , Jassim Al Suwaidi , Nidal Asaad , Dawood Darbar , Mohamad Saad
Journal of Clinical Medicine (2024)

A pragmatic perspective on AI transparency at workplace

Ghanim Al-Sulaiti, Mohammad Amin Sadeghi, Lokendra Chauhan, Ji Lucas, Sanjay Chawla, Ahmed Elmagarmid
AI and Ethics (2024)

Multi-omics and machine learning reveal context-specific gene regulatory activities of PML::RARA in acute promyelocytic leukemia

William Villiers, Audrey Kelly, Xiaohan He, James Kaufman-Cook, Abdurrahman Elbasir, Halima Bensmail, Paul Lavender, Richard Dillon, Borbála Mifsud, Cameron S. Osborne
Nature Communications (2023)

Classes are Not Clusters: Improving Label-Based Evaluation of Dimensionality Reduction

Hyeon Jeon, Yun-Hsin Kuo, Michael Aupetit, Kwan-Liu Ma, Jinwook Seo
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2024)

Measuring Engagement Through Remote Interactions of Customers: Introducing METRIC

Jinan Y. Azem, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Bernard J. Jansen
International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC) (2023)

Employing large language models in survey research

Bernard J. Jansen, Soon-gyo Jung, Joni Salminen
Natural Language Processing Journal (2023)

Understanding Audiences, Customers, and Users via Analytics

Bernard J. Jansen, Kholoud K. Aldous, Joni Salminen, Hind Almerekhi, Soon-gyo Jung
Springer International Publishing AG (2023)

Cross Modal Data Discovery over Structured and Unstructured Data Lakes

Mohamed Y. Eltabakh, Mayuresh Kunjir, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Mohammad Shahmeer Ahmad
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2023)

Mapping Flood Exposure, Damage, and Population Needs Using Remote and Social Sensing: A Case Study of 2022 Pakistan Floods

Zainab Akhtar, Umair Qazi, Rizwan Sadiq, Aya El-Sakka, Muhammad Sajjad, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran.
ACM Web Conference 2023 – Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW (2023) 

Incidents1M: A Large-Scale Dataset of Images with Natural Disasters, Damage, and Incidents

Ethan Weber, Dim P. Papadopoulos, Agata Lapedriza, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran, Antonio Torralba.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2023)

Validation of Polygenic Risk Scores for Coronary Heart Disease in a Middle Eastern Cohort Using Whole Genome Sequencing

Mohamad Saad , Ayman El-Menyar , Khalid Kunji , Ehsan Ullah , Jassim Al Suwaidi , Iftikhar J. Kullo
Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine (2022)

Including diverse and admixed populations in genetic epidemiology research

Amke Caliebe , Fasil Tekola‐Ayele , Burcu F. Darst , Xuexia Wang , Yeunjoo E. Song , Jiang Gui , Ronnie A. Sebro , David J. Balding , Mohamad Saad , Marie‐Pierre Dubé
Genetic Epidemiology (2022)

Untargeted Metabolomics Profiling Reveals Perturbations in Arginine-NO Metabolism in Middle Eastern Patients with Coronary Heart Disease

Ehsan Ullah , Ayman El-Menyar , Khalid Kunji , Reem Elsousy , Haira R. B. Mokhtar , Eiman Ahmad , Maryam Al-Nesf , Alka Beotra , Mohammed Al-Maadheed , Vidya Mohamed-Ali , Mohamad Saad , Jassim Al Suwaidi
Metabolites (2022)

Genetic predisposition to cancer across people of different ancestries in Qatar: a population-based, cohort study

Mohamad Saad , Younes Mokrab , Najeeb Halabi , Jingxuan Shan , Rozaimi Razali , Khalid Kunji , Najeeb Syed , Ramzi Temanni , Murugan Subramanian , Michele Ceccarelli , Said I Ismail , Wadha Al-Muftah , Radja Badji , Hamdi Mbarek , Dima Darwish , Tasnim Fadl , Heba Yasin , Maryem Ennaifar , Rania Abdellatif , Fatima Alkuwari , Muhammad Alvi , Yasser Al-Sarraj , Chadi Saad , Eleni Fethnou , Fatima Qafoud , Eiman Alkhayat , Nahla Afifi , Sara Tomei , Wei Liu , Stephan Lorenz , Najeeb Syed , Hakeem Almabrazi , Fazulur R Vempalli , Ramzi Temanni , Tariq Abu Saqri , Mohammedhusen Khatib , Mehshad Hamza , Tariq Abu Zaid , Ahmed El Khouly , Tushar Pathare , Shafeeq Poolat , Rashid Al-Ali , Omar Albagha , Souhaila Al-Khodor , Mashael Alshafai , Ramin Badii , Lotfi Chouchane , Xavier Estivill , Khalid Fakhro , Hamdi Mbarek , Younes Mokrab , Jithesh V Puthen , Karsten Suhre , Zohreh Tatari , Arash Rafii Tabrizi , Davide Bedognetti , Lotfi Chouchane
The Lancet Oncology (2022)

RPT: relational pre-trained transformer is almost all you need towards democratizing data preparation

Nan Tang, Ju Fan, Fangyi Li, Jianhong Tu, Xiaoyong Du, Guoliang Li, Sam Madden, Mourad Ouzzani
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2021)

Deep Learning for Blocking in Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration

Muhammad Ebraheem, Saravanan Thirumuruganathan, Shafiq Joty, Mourad Ouzzani, Nan Tang
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2021)

Germline genetic contribution to the immune landscape of cancer

Rosalyn W. Sayaman , Mohamad Saad , Vésteinn Thorsson , Donglei Hu , Wouter Hendrickx , Jessica Roelands , Eduard Porta-Pardo , Younes Mokrab , Farshad Farshidfar , Tomas Kirchhoff , Randy F. Sweis , Oliver F. Bathe , Carolina Heimann , Michael J. Campbell , Cynthia Stretch , Scott Huntsman , Rebecca E. Graff , Najeeb Syed , Laszlo Radvanyi , Simon Shelley , Denise Wolf , Francesco M. Marincola , Michele Ceccarelli , Jérôme Galon , Elad Ziv , Davide Bedognetti
Immunity (2021)

Data-driven personas

Bernard J. Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, Kathleen Guan
Springer Nature (2021)

Steering Distortions to Preserve Classes and Neighbors in Supervised Dimensionality Reduction

Benoît Colange, Jaakko Peltonen, Michael Aupetit, Denys Dutykh, Sylvain Lespinats
Proceedings of NeurIPS (2020)

Comprehensive review and assessment of computational methods for predicting RNA post-transcriptional modification sites from RNA sequences

Zhen Chen, Pei Zhao, Fuyi Li, Yanan Wang, A. Ian Smith, Geoffrey I. Webb, Tatsuya Akutsu, Abdelkader Baggag, Halima Bensmail, Jiangning Song
Briefings in Bioinformatics (2020)

BCrystal: An interpretable sequence-based protein crystallization predictor

Abdurrahman Elbasir, Raghvendra Mall, Khalid Kunji, Reda Rawi, Zeyaul Islam, Gwo Yu Chuang, Prasanna R. Kolatkar, Halima Bensmail
Bioinformatics (2020)

Toward Perception-Based Evaluation of Clustering Techniques for Visual Analytics

Michael Aupetit, Michael Sedlmair, Mostafa M. Abbas, Abdelkader Baggag, Halima Bensmail
Proceedings of the IEEE Visualization Conference (2019)

DeepCrystal: A Deep Learning Framework for Sequence-based Protein Crystallization Prediction

Abdurrahman Elbasir, Balasubramanian Moovarkumudalvan, Khalid Kunji, Prasanna R. Kolatkar, Halima Bensmail, Raghvendra Mall
IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) (2018)

Comparison and assessment of family- and population-based genotype imputation methods in large pedigrees

Ehsan Ullah , Raghvendra Mall , Mostafa M. Abbas , Khalid Kunji , Alejandro Q. Nato , Halima Bensmail , Ellen M. Wijsman , Mohamad Saad
Genome Research (2019)

DeepER–Deep Entity Resolution

Muhammad Ebraheem, Saravanan Thirumuruganathan, Shafiq Joty, Mourad Ouzzani, Nan Tang
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2018)

Automatically Conceptualizing Social Media Analytics Data via Personas

Soon-gyo Jung , Joni Salminen , Jisun An , Haewoon Kwak , Bernard Jansen
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (2018)

Assessing the Accuracy of Four Popular Face Recognition Tools for Inferring Gender, Age, and Race

Soon-gyo Jung , Jisun An , Haewoon Kwak , Joni Salminen , Bernard Jansen
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (2018)

CrisisMMD: Multimodal twitter datasets from natural disasters

Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran
Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media (2018)

RGBM: Regularized gradient boosting machines for identification of the transcriptional regulators of discrete glioma subtypes

Raghvendra Mall, Luigi Cerulo, Luciano Garofano, Veronique Frattini, Khalid Kunji, Halima Bensmail, Thais S. Sabedot, Houtan Noushmehr, Anna Lasorella, Antonio Iavarone, Michele Ceccarelli
Nucleic Acids Research (2018)

Automatic Persona Generation (APG)

Soon-gyo Jung , Joni Salminen , Haewoon Kwak , Jisun An , Bernard J. Jansen
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Human Information Interaction&Retrieval – CHIIR '18 (2018)

Persona Generation from Aggregated Social Media Data

Soon-Gyo Jung , Jisun An , Haewoon Kwak , Moeed Ahmad , Lene Nielsen , Bernard J. Jansen
Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017)

Rayyan—a web and mobile app for systematic reviews

Mourad Ouzzani, Hossam Hammady, Zbys Fedorowicz, Ahmed Elmagarmid
Systematic Reviews (2016)

AIDR: Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response

Muhammad Imran, Carlos Castillo, Ji Lucas, Patrick Meier, Sarah Vieweg.
Conference on World Wide Web WWW (2014)