Wael Al-Alwani
I deal with people and data.
I am currently based in Toronto and have dealt with various data management areas, in terms of consultation and implementation, as well as designing data and AI products/services architecture for the clients I worked with including: Ministry of Labor and Social Development (Saudi Arabia), where I developed number of fraud detection scenarios that identified almost a million potential cases, eventually saving millions of dollars.
I performed a full-fledged data management maturity assessment and developed a data strategy that enables the ministry’s strategy. The data strategy included designing number of data analytics products. Working with the National Center for Performance Measurement (Adaa-Saudi Arabia), I led the building of data integration layer of the International Performance Hub (iph.sa), a global KPI benchmarking platform. Also, I was a principal data consultant for the National Labor Observatory project, where I laid out various data quality practices that improved decision making and policy design accuracy. Additionally, I provided daily support for all the data processing, data warehouse, and business intelligence development activities.
In the private sector, I developed a data processing pipeline to perform sentiment analysis and influence scoring using Social Network Analysis algorithms on Facebook data. I also performed content and context analysis (temporal) on Aljazeera Arabic site’s comments section to detect opinion manipulation activities, executed by PR agencies. The project landed me a Data Journalism internship in Aljazeera Media Network HQ – Qatar in 2014.
I am passionate about social network analysis, graph databases, and systems thinking. I translated this passion to various projects dealing with:
– The corruption networks of Egypt’s military generals and businessmen (understanding the post/pre-revolution economic scene)
– Syria’s businessmen and their political ties and the impact on “The Rebuilding of Syria”
– The Saudi Nonprofit sector map and the influencing donation dynamics
– Yemen’s humanitarian aid efforts network using UN’s FTS data
I participated in authoring the following publications:
– Taming the Data Elephant, reviewed by Frank Buytendijk, Gartner Fellow in Gartner’s Data and Analytics group
– Towards Effective Uses of Data in Saudi Arabia [Arabic paper]
– Reinventing Organizations book, by Frederic Laloux (translated it to Arabic)
I hold a Masters Degree in Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining from KAUST, Saudi Arabia.
In Community Intelligence, I’m leading projects related to data analytics and AI.