Presents selected recent work from Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute, demonstrating how new Falcon models are extending Arabic AI across language, speech and visual information.
Through a focused series of demonstrations, the session will show how these developments engage with Emirati Arabic, spoken language, images and documents, and consider what they may make possible for knowledge institutions, researchers and public-facing services. The presentation will also clarify the relevance, current limitations and responsible-use considerations of these emerging capabilities without becoming a technical account of the underlying systems.
Dr. Hakim Hacid
Dr. Ludovick Lepauloux
Ludovick Lepauloux is a Director at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, where he leads audio and speech AI research and drives technology transfer into startups. His team builds speech recognition, speech synthesis and voice agents for Arabic and Gulf dialects, and contributed to Falcon ASR, Falcon3-Audio and WavLink. His career spans research, industry and entrepreneurship: after a PhD in signal processing (University of Rennes 1, Orange Labs), he worked on audio R&D at Intel and NXP, where his work shipped in consumer devices, then co-founded Seven Sensing Software and Blu Manta and served as Blu Manta’s CEO from 2019 to 2023. He is a named inventor on eight patent filings.
Dr. Basma El Amel Boussaha
Dr. Basma El Amel Boussaha is a Principal Researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, where she leads the Arabic and Dialects team in generative AI and natural language processing. With over 10 years of experience spanning academic research and industry, she specializes in large language models, distributed training, and Arabic NLP. Basma earned her PhD in Computer Science from Nantes Université, focusing on retrieval-based dialogue systems, and holds an MSc from Université Paris-Saclay in AI and NLP. Before joining TII, she worked as a Senior Data Scientist at Wolters Kluwer Legal Software in Paris, where she built and deployed deep-learning question answering models in production for the Legal domain. She is the author of multiple publications. Fluent in Arabic, English, and French, Basma is passionate about advancing language technology for Arabic and its dialects.
Abdul Muneer
Abdul Muneer is an AI engineer at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, where he leads the work on Falcon ASR. Released in October 2026, it is a speech recognition model with a particular focus on Emirati Arabic. It also covers Modern Standard Arabic, other Gulf and Arabic dialects, and English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. His aim is to give spoken Arabic and its dialects the same quality of AI support that written English has, so that lectures, broadcasts and oral histories can be searched, preserved and shared. He also works on the Falcon language models and is lead author of the Falcon3-Audio research paper. Abdul Muneer has about nineteen years of experience in software, ten of them in artificial intelligence. Before TII he worked at Intel, Minds.ai and Cisco. He holds a US patent in reinforcement learning and has published research on driver-assistance systems for cars.