Houda Bouamor, a leading Arabic NLP researcher, outlines the key challenges for AI in the Middle East—and how CMU-Q is building a new generation of talent to meet them. The future of artificial intelligence in the Middle East hinges on solving its "inclusion" problem, according to Houda Bouamor, a leading expert in Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) and an associate teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q). Most AI models are trained on formal,