Biography: Prof. Mariette Awad is the director of the Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Computing Hub at American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon, a tenured associate professor at the ECE department. Awad’s academic contributions are recognized globally. She is among the top 2% of influential scholars in 2022 and 2023, by Stanford University and has earned the 2024 Abdul Hameed Shoman Award for Arab Researchers in the field of engineering and technological sciences – computational modeling in data analysis. Awad also won in 2024 the Intissar Ahdab award for Women’s Excellence and Impact in Research.

 

She is a Lead Certified Assessor in ethical AI, has completed a CAIDP AI Policy Clinic in 2024 and has contributed to the drafting of the Munich Convention on AI, Data and Human Rights. She has published over 130 manuscripts and had secured more than 4.4 millions USD from different funders such as META, NIH, Qatar Foundation. Her best seller book “Efficient Learning Machines” was one of the 5 most downloaded books by Springer Nature in Sept 2020. Springer Nature, is a leading authority in publishing textbooks and academic books for more than 175 years. BookAuthority listed her work as “#1 among the 41 Best-Selling Machine Theory books of all time” in 2020.

 

Dr. Awad promotes women in engineering and she is a co-organizer and an ambassador for the AUB Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference, a technical conference organized in close collaboration with the Stanford Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. Since 2017, the conference attracted 4600+ attendees from more than 300 organizations, 20+ sectors, and 40+ countries.

 

Beyond academia, Dr. Awad is actively involved in industry collaborations and consulting projects. She has worked with many UN organizations such as UNESCO, UNICEF and ESCWA as an AI Expert for the National AI plan and the Arab Vision 2040. She is a co-founder for HolexP, an online platform to teach programming hardware using Natural Language Processing that won the MIT Pan Arab Innovation Award and Chiney Hostler Social Innovation Award in 2022.