This paper presents an experience report on teaching an AI course to business executives in the UAE. The course focuses on enabling students to understand how to incorporate AI into existing business processes, rather than focusing only on theoretical and technical aspects. The paper discusses the course overview, curriculum, teaching methods, and reflections on teaching adult learners in the UAE.
A new culturally inclusive and linguistically diverse dataset called Palm for Arabic LLMs is introduced, covering 22 Arab countries and featuring instructions in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and dialectal Arabic (DA) across 20 topics. The dataset was built through a year-long community-driven project involving 44 researchers from across the Arab world. Evaluation of frontier LLMs using the dataset reveals limitations in cultural and dialectal understanding, with some countries being better represented than others.
This study compares AI uptake in the UAE and Kuwait, analyzing how constitutional, collective-choice, and operational rules shape AI implementation and its impact on citizen centricity and public value creation. It finds that the UAE's concentrated authority and pro-innovation environment enable scaling AI initiatives, while Kuwait's dispersed governance and cautious approach limit progress despite similar resources. The research highlights the importance of vertical rule coherence over wealth in determining AI's public-value yield.
The ArabJobs dataset is a new corpus of over 8,500 Arabic job advertisements collected from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The dataset contains over 550,000 words and captures linguistic, regional, and socio-economic variation in the Arab labor market. It is available on GitHub and can be used for fairness-aware Arabic NLP and labor market research.
This paper analyzes the energy consumption and carbon footprint of LLM inference in the UAE compared to Iceland, Germany, and the USA. The study uses DeepSeek Coder 1.3B and the HumanEval dataset to evaluate code generation. It provides a comparative analysis of geographical trade-offs for climate-aware AI deployment, specifically addressing the challenges and potential of datacenters in desert regions.
This paper presents a UI-level evaluation of ALLaM-34B, an Arabic-centric LLM developed by SDAIA and deployed in the HUMAIN Chat service. The evaluation used a prompt pack spanning various Arabic dialects, code-switching, reasoning, and safety, with outputs scored by frontier LLM judges. Results indicate strong performance in generation, code-switching, MSA handling, reasoning, and improved dialect fidelity, positioning ALLaM-34B as a robust Arabic LLM suitable for real-world use.
This study assesses workforce preparedness for AI in the GCC region, using socio-technical systems theory to analyze national AI strategies and initiatives in KSA, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. The research combines TF-IDF analysis, case studies of MBZUAI and SDAIA Academy, and scenario planning to evaluate the balance between technical capacity and social alignment. The study identifies a potential two-track talent system and emphasizes the importance of regulatory convergence for successful AI adoption.