Tech Talk: Doing Data Science in Data Deserts | Fatima Abu Salem | WiDS 2021

Fatima Abu Salem, Associate Professor at the American University of Beirut reports on a series of works associated with the Syrian conflict, with help from data obtained from the Violations Documentation Center (VDC). Fatima presents on fake news detection, predicting primary health care demand by Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and understanding some notions of Syrian refugee mobility in Turkey, all seen as instigated by “peaks’’ in the Syrian war, revealed through the VDC. She also presents a brief overview of in-progress projects with a social impact, in application to smart irrigation, predicting birth defects in Lebanon using air pollution data, and quantifying anti-refugee bias across Lebanese news corpora.