Teaching & mentoring

Invited instructor at Concordia’s Applied AI Institute in 2026: Sustainable AI Practices: Balancing Innovation with Responsibility (Mitacs, 18 March) and a workshop on generative AI as a project-management assistant (PMI Montréal, 17 June, delivered in English).

An invited introduction to explainable AI for Concordia’s Hardware Verification Group in 2023 was followed by scientific mentoring meetings. His mentoring has covered engineering capstone projects, internships and master’s research in speech, multimodality, signal processing and AI for health.

Since 2019, Alaa has mentored students through engineering capstone projects, internships and master’s research. His current CV records eleven students across these settings, working on speech, multimodal learning, signal processing, learnable representations and AI for health.

The work spans the full research process: shaping a question, implementing and testing a model, examining errors and communicating the result. His own research responsibilities in experimental design, ablation studies, statistical analysis and scientific writing inform this mentoring.

One student progressed from an internship under his mentoring to master’s research, coauthored a peer-reviewed conference paper, and became first author of two submitted manuscripts. Alaa is second author on both and corresponding author on one. The public research record distinguishes these submissions from accepted publications.

Alaa can teach, mentor and assess in French and English. His engineering education was primarily in French; his scientific publications and the 2026 PMI Montréal workshop use English.