The lack of dedicated CS datasets limits ASR performance, as most models rely on monolingual or mixed-language corpora that fail to reflect real-world CS patterns. This issue is critical in multilingual societies where CS occurs in informal and formal settings. A key example is Catalan-Spanish CS, widely used in media and parliamentary speeches. In this work, we improve ASR for Catalan-Spanish CS by exploring three strategies: (1) generating synthetic CS data, (2) concatenating monolingual audio, and (3) leveraging real CS data with language tokens. We extract CS data from Catalan speech corpora and fine-tune OpenAI's Whisper models, making them available on Hugging Face. Results show that combining a modest amount of synthetic CS data with the dominant language token yields the best transcription performance.

We present Fanar, a platform for Arabic-centric multimodal generative AI systems, that supports language, speech and image generation tasks. At the heart of Fanar are Fanar Star and Fanar Prime, two highly capable Arabic Large Language Models (LLMs) that are best in the class on well established benchmarks for similar sized models. Fanar Star is a 7B (billion) parameter model that was trained from scratch on nearly 1 trillion clean and deduplicated Arabic, English and Code tokens. Fanar Prime is a 9B parameter model continually trained on the Gemma-2 9B base model on the same 1 trillion token set. Both models are concurrently deployed and designed to address different types of prompts transparently routed through a custom-built orchestrator. The Fanar platform provides many other capabilities including a customized Islamic Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system for handling religious prompts, a Recency RAG for summarizing information about current or recent events that have occurred after the pre-training data cut-off date. The platform provides additional cognitive capabilities including in-house bilingual speech recognition that supports multiple Arabic dialects, voice and image generation that is fine-tuned to better reflect regional characteristics. Finally, Fanar provides an attribution service that can be used to verify the authenticity of fact based generated content. The design, development, and implementation of Fanar was entirely undertaken at Hamad Bin Khalifa University's Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and was sponsored by Qatar's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to enable sovereign AI technology development.

Accurate weather and climate modeling is critical for both scientific advancement and safeguarding communities against environmental risks. Traditional approaches rely heavily on Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, which simulate energy and matter flow across Earth's systems. However, heavy computational requirements and low efficiency restrict the suitability of NWP, leading to a pressing need for enhanced modeling techniques. Neural network-based models have emerged as promising alternatives, leveraging data-driven approaches to forecast atmospheric variables. In this work, we focus on limited-area modeling and train our model specifically for localized region-level downstream tasks. As a case study, we consider the MENA region due to its unique climatic challenges, where accurate localized weather forecasting is crucial for managing water resources, agriculture and mitigating the impacts of extreme weather events. This targeted approach allows us to tailor the model's capabilities to the unique conditions of the region of interest. Our study aims to validate the effectiveness of integrating parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methodologies, specifically Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants, to enhance forecast accuracy, as well as training speed, computational resource utilization, and memory efficiency in weather and climate modeling for specific regions.

Looks like it's not just teachers and professors who are worried about ChatGPT. Last week, investment bank JP Morgan announced it was cracking down on the use of OpenAI's AI-powered chatbots as part of restrictions imposed around third-party software. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs are also restricting the use of ChatGPT by employees. IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services is a little more optimistic, saying generative AI platforms like ChatGPT will create an "AI co-worker" and not replace jobs. The Microsoft-backed software, for sure, is not going anywhere.

Founders of new era in Artificial Intelligence announced their METAHUMAN platform during GITEX 2022 in Dubai. DRIPS.TV is a Metahuman Artificial Intelligence platform that literally can replace human being at News channels as a beginning, speaking all languages in any shape and look. Matti K. from Finland and Mohammed Ebrahim Al Fardan from the Kingdom of Bahrain, have been working day and night during the pandemic to create the next unicorn. "It is METAHUMAN at last, speaking all languages on earth with almost perfect face and body impressions to deliver any broadcast, the future is now." Said Mohammed Al Fardan, founder and technology expert.

He overcame surrender and did not despair despite his projects having been rejected, at the beginning of his career, but eventually became an entrepreneur in technology across Middle East-wide through his company "WideBot," which specializes in artificial intelligence "AI" and its influential role in customer relationship management (CRM) and digital business management. He is "Mohamed Nabil," a 35-year-old, from Alexandria who graduated from the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Mansoura University in 2007. Immediately after graduation, he began to think seriously about how to start his own business, he had already set up companies, some companies have failed miserably and some have succeeded, but it was not a great and overwhelming success. During Mohamed's struggle, he supported him and stood by his side, Ahmed was his college friend, and he is also with his technical co-founder. And their work on that idea took about two years, they presented their idea to more than one large supermarket in Egypt and abroad, but unfortunately, it was not successful enough and the idea of their project was very new to the market.

As part of ongoing efforts to diversify their economies and build a platform for sustainable future growth, MENA nations are increasingly turning towards artificial intelligence (AI). A slew of recent investment and initiatives – primarily in academia and the government, but also in the private sector – has reinvigorated interest from industry leaders around the globe in the potential for AI to strengthen the efficiency and sustainability of MENA economies. According to a report from the Economist Impact Unit (EIU) and Google published earlier this year, AI could bring about an additional $320bn in economic growth in the MENA region by 2030. Many long-term economic strategies in the region target high-value sectors with the potential to benefit from the Fourth Industrial Revolution – a raft of technological advancements in AI, data and cloud computing that merge the physical, digital and biological worlds. In recent years the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt have published ambitious, government-driven strategies to develop AI.

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The financial services and banking sector is predicted to become the highest spender on artificial intelligence technology in the Middle East and North Africa, according to Google. The sector will have a share of almost 25 per cent of all AI investments in the region, with the use of the technology in banking alone expected to contribute up to 13.6 per cent to the region's gross domestic product by 2030, the Alphabet-owned company said in the Future of AI in the Mena report. "This would take shape through a range of applications, such as deep learning for algorithmic trading, fraud analysis and investing, as well as smart portfolio management and customer profiling," the report said. The overall potential effect of AI on the region's economic growth is significant, with the Mena region estimated to accrue $320 billion by 2030 from the value added by the technology. This is mostly from costs saved through automating processes, as well as improving products and services across the region's industries, the report said.

Probabilistic Classifiers Chains (PCC) offers interesting properties to solve multi-label classification tasks due to its ability to estimate the joint probability of the labels. However, PCC presents the major drawback of having a high computational cost in the inference process required to predict new samples. Lately, several approaches have been proposed to overcome this issue, including beam search and an epsilon-Approximate algorithm based on uniform-cost search. Surprisingly, the obvious possibility of using heuristic search has not been considered yet. This paper studies this alternative and proposes an admisible heuristic that, applied in combination with A* algorithm, guarantees, not only optimal predictions in terms of subset 0/1 loss, but also that it always explores less nodes than epsilon-Approximate algorithm. In the experiments reported, the number of nodes explored by our method is less than two times the number of labels for all datasets analyzed. But, the difference in explored nodes must be large enough to compensate the overhead of the heuristic in order to improve prediction time. Thus, our proposal may be a good choice for complex multi-label problems.