I am a Palestinian who was born and raised in Gaza. I completed my bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the Islamic University of Gaza in 2019 and attended the University of Glasgow in Scotland as a part of the Erasmus + exchange program in 2018. Currently, I am doing a master's in Data Science at the University of Sheffield. I love to experiment with data, particularly text data where I am interested in natural language processing (NLP) and more specifically Arabic NLP. A few months before starting my master's I joined the iWAN research group (at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia) remotely as a research assistant focused on Arabic Language NLP. Where I led research efforts on social media analysis for Arabic content and published the resulting paper at EACL|WANLP2021 and ACLing2021.

As the Palestinian market has still not adopted data-driven solutions, I would like to focus on contributing to building a data science community with qualified data scientists in Palestine. In addition, I will keep working on research related to data and social media analysis and continue my academic career with a PhD focus on computational social science.

I chose the Data science courses at the University of Sheffield because the course offers outstanding modules that will fulfil my curiosity about data and social science. The city location is one of my favourite things about Sheffield. The city is central to exploring the UK and discovering new places. Moreover, Sheffield is close to the Peak District National Park, which allows me to engage in various outdoor activities such as walks, running trails, and hiking.