AI for Young Social Innovators
2025Ran the training for Al Sharq Forum's two-day AI-Driven Solutions for Young Social Innovators webinar: how changemakers across the region can put AI to work on the problems their communities actually have.
Teaching
Some I teach myself. Some are taught by other instructors, from notes I write for them.
The material I wrote at ZAKA reached more than 7,000 people in 2025.
I have taught and mentored more than 400 people directly.
2026
Separate from ZAKA, and my most recent teaching. Ten weeks taking people from understanding AI to shipping it. I co-designed it with Jean-Pierre Fakhry and Hasan Kanaan, and I ran the code reviews for the AI track.
Code review is the part of teaching that actually changes how someone works. You can explain a principle in a lecture and watch it not survive contact with a deadline. Reviewing what someone actually wrote, and being honest about it, is slower and it sticks.
2023 to 2025
Most of my teaching happened here. ZAKA is an AI education company in Beirut, and the programmes below were built and delivered under it.
An eight week online professional certificate for the American University of Beirut, for people starting from zero. I wrote it end to end: the syllabus, the lessons, the assessments, and the notes future instructors teach it from. Someone else delivers it, which was the point. The examples are local, including ones in Arabic.
A national AI programme for university students, faculty and staff, run with Microsoft. I co-wrote the course and taught on it. Two months, self-paced material, live workshops, and a hackathon at the end.
Judged the Clyntech climate tech hackathon, run by Berytech. Judging is teaching compressed into ten minutes: you have one pitch to work out whether a team understands their own system, and the feedback has to be useful to people who just spent a weekend on it.
A Data Analytics track delivered with shareQ and ProAbled alongside ZAKA's education team, graduating twenty Professionally Abled participants. The same week I ran the Career Map workshop, walking high-school students through what AI careers actually look like.
The first K-12 AI curriculum in the MENA region. I wrote content covering grades 4 to 12: data, how machines learn, what the tools can do, and how to use them responsibly.
For people who use AI rather than build it. Seven modules and about twenty-four tools, covering AI fundamentals, getting real work out of ChatGPT, generating images, video and audio, using all of it for creative problem solving, and where the ethical lines are. Twenty-one hours across seven sessions, built to survive a working week. I taught three cohorts, retailored each time for the room it was going into, including a training for teachers at Université Saint-Joseph.
AI training written and delivered for Inception, a G42 company, and VISA Jordan in 2024, and IMAGIC in 2025. Different rooms, same problem: people who are good at their jobs and now have to work out what these tools are actually for. Practical sessions, not theory.
The technical track, and the one that turns people into practitioners rather than users. The four week bootcamp runs from data science and machine learning through deep learning and computer vision to natural language processing and time series, and nobody is certified without presenting a capstone. The longer certification track covers the same ground at depth, across four cohorts. One bootcamp cohort in 2023, then certification from there.
Appearances
Where the teaching leaves the classroom: conference tutorials, embassy halls, ethics panels, and training rooms across the region.
Ran the training for Al Sharq Forum's two-day AI-Driven Solutions for Young Social Innovators webinar: how changemakers across the region can put AI to work on the problems their communities actually have.
A session at the Youth Empowered by AI event, held with Together For Lebanon, followed by a panel on the same ground: privacy, bias, responsibility, safety, and what using these systems carefully actually asks of you.
A presentation in Beirut with ZAKA and Tech Trendy: is AI hype or here to stay, what makes ChatGPT tick, how image generation actually works, and where all of it might go next.
Taught the blockchain and crypto session of the LegalTech Essentials course at Université La Sagesse, run with SADER Legal and ZAKA for law professionals and students.
A tutorial at the MENA Data Science Conference in Egypt: The Developer's Guide to ChatGPT API.
Results
The projects are the honest measure of whether the teaching worked. These came out of the SE Factory bootcamp.
A security orchestration and response platform using a temporal graph for retrieval.
An AI operations assistant built for Lebanese small businesses.
Predicts and explains why participants drop out of clinical trials, ranks a cohort for triage, and escalates the serious cases. Built with an explicit honesty rule: every number has to be traceable.
A living-world RPG where a medieval town runs itself on about thirteen models and a local LLM, and the people remember you.
A multi-tenant real estate platform for Lebanon, with retrieval-based search and agency operations.
Personal finance intelligence. Upload a bank statement and it categorises, forecasts, and flags anomalies and recurring charges.
Watches live network traffic, scores every flow with a trained classifier, and investigates the high-risk ones automatically.
Due diligence for mergers and acquisitions. Upload the documents, get a risk-scored analysis with every finding cited back to its source.
Earlier, at ZAKA, students I mentored built a guidance platform matching Lebanese students to university majors, an electrical fault detection system, and a text-to-video pipeline.
Graduates from cohorts I taught now work as AI and ML engineers.