Ahmad Alabdulkareem is a former co-director of the Center for Complex Systems (CCS) at KACST and MIT. He was the first PhD graduate of the Technical Leaders Program (TLP), which aims to train and qualify a new generation of leaders and decision makers, and is an Assistant Professor at KACST. Over the years, he has worked on a diverse set of topics across different domains from predicting people’s features from their communication patterns to building the analytics backbone for smart city platforms with his areas of expertise including Data Science, Machine Learning, Network Science, Deep Learning, Statistical Inference, Data Mining, Analytics & Visualization, Complex Modeling and Simulation. He received his PhD in Computational Science & Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with a dissertation in the area of machine learning and computational network science under the supervision of one of the most cited authors in computer science; Prof. Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland. His previous studies were at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in computer science, where his research was in the area of machine learning in the Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group working on enhancing classification algorithms.