I invited to attend “Tweets for Change” speaker series in Washington, DC which was organized by Twitter.  https://fortheculturetour.splashthat.com

Since then I’ve been interested in exploring applications for leveraging artificial intelligence to improve people’s life. I was very delighted to get involved in a research group at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) with the Social Computing group during Spring 2017.  Led by Dr. Luis Fernandez Luque, I got an opportunity to work on a project  that aimed to provide health education to mothers to maintain a healthy weight for their children. For the purpose of this study, we developed a chatbot in order to utilize technology to support parents’ engagement to sustain the weight loss of their children.

The project involved three stages. The first stage was understanding the preferences and needs to build a comprehensive knowledge base for chatbot. In order to explore parents’ needs and interests, the research team created WhatsApp group. The first stage was to analyze the contents of the group and the group dynamics among parents.  The findings of this study led to a design specification and more tailored contents to build a Telegram bot. The second stage of this project was designing and implementing a chatbot. The chatbot built was delivered to mothers in Qatar where they took a part of.  Regular messages were sent to foster education to the mothers about their children food consumption, diet and exercise.