Dr. Ahmed Ali is a Principal Engineer at the Arabic Language Technologies group (ALT) at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). He is the founder of Arabic Speech at ALT . His work interests are in the area of speech recognition and natural language processing. Dr. Ali completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and BSc at Cairo University. He joined QCRI in 2011. Prior to joining QCRI, Dr. Ali worked for Nuance in Cambridge, UK from 2009-2011, SpinVox (Marlow, startup) 2006-2009, and spent six years at different IBM labs prior to that, including two years at Watson, USA. 

His current research on speech recognition has led to the development of state-of-the-art multi-dialect Arabic speech recognition: QCRI Advanced Transcription System (QATS). Al-Jazeera, DW and BCC have all used QATS to transcribe their online content. Dr. Ali’s team won first place in the worldwide MGB-2 speech recognition competition. He also received the prestigious Qatar Foundation Best Innovation Award in 2018.