The Tunisian AI Society (TΛIS) Announces Winners of Tunisian AI Awards
The Tunisian AI Society (TΛIS) is proud to announce the winners of the Tunisian AI Awards, celebrating the brightest talents shaping the future of artificial intelligence in Tunisia and beyond. This prestigious distinction honors the exceptional achievements of Tunisian professionals, researchers, and pioneers who significantly contribute to the global AI landscape. This year's winners are:
- Asma Ben Abacha, Senior Scientist, Microsoft Health AI – Maryland, USA Asma Ben Abacha holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Paris-Sud (2012), a Master's degree in Research from the University of Paris 13 (2008), and a degree in Software Engineering from ENSI, Tunisia (2007). She is a recognized expert in medical Natural Language Processing (NLP) and applied AI in healthcare. Her work covers medical question-answering systems, clinical report generation, doctor-patient dialogue synthesis, visual question-answering in radiology, and extracting social determinants of health to improve care equity. Author of over 80 peer-reviewed scientific publications with over 4,000 citations, she has played a central role in evolving evaluation standards through major initiatives such as the MEDIQA challenges (2019-2025) and medical tasks ImageCLEF. Winner of the NLM Service Group Awards (2017-2018), she is also a member of the TΛIS advisory committee, actively contributing to linking her industrial impact at Microsoft to the development of the AI ecosystem in Tunisia and promoting ethical and human-centered AI.
- Lotfi Ben Romdhane, Professor, ISITCom – University of Sousse, Tunisia Lotfi Ben Romdhane holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada (1999, with highest distinctions), and is a graduate engineer from ENSI Tunisia (1994). He has been the Dean of ISITCom since 2017 and is the director of the MARS laboratory, specializing in automated reasoning. His areas of expertise cover artificial intelligence, social network analysis, big data, and graph algorithms. He has supervised over 10 Ph.D. theses in areas such as community detection, malware analysis, and web services, and is the author of over 40 publications in top-tier journals and conferences (IEEE and ACM). Beyond research, he plays a major institutional role as a senator at EMUNI University and president of the Tunisian Computer Science Society, actively contributing to strengthening research, education, and governance of AI in Tunisia.
- Zina Ben Miled, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, IUPUI/Purdue University – Indiana, USA
Zina Ben Miled holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Purdue University (1997), a Master's degree from the same university (1990), and a Bachelor's degree from Oregon State University (1988). A senior member of IEEE, her research focuses on machine learning, knowledge discovery, evolutionary software architectures, and AI solutions applied to healthcare.
Her work includes predictive models for Alzheimer's disease, integration of biomedical data, and large-scale industrial optimizations, notably in collaboration with institutions such as the NIH, Eli Lilly, and Dow.
Her contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the NSF CAREER Award (2002), the Women in High Tech Indiana Award (2001), and the Leadership Award from the National Arab American Medical Association (NAM) in 2020.
These awards highlight the global and interdisciplinary dimension of artificial intelligence, rewarding leaders whose expertise spans both industry and academia, between the United States and Tunisia. Their work collectively contributes to the advancement of AI in key areas such as natural language processing, machine learning, knowledge engineering, data science, and AI applied to healthcare, transforming cutting-edge research into concrete, high-impact solutions.
Selection Criteria
The winners were selected based on the following criteria:
- Academic and research contributions: scientific excellence and publications in AI
- Conference participation: regional and international engagement
- Professional experience and notoriety: recognition in the AI community
- Contributions to the AI community: active support for the Tunisian ecosystem
- Ethical and social impact: positive influence on society
- Innovation and future potential: high-impact solutions with global reach
About the Tunisian AI Society (TΛIS)
The Tunisian AI Society (TΛIS) is an association dedicated to promoting and developing artificial intelligence in Tunisia. Founded in 2023 by the RECONNECTT association, TΛIS is based in Paris and works to foster innovation, collaboration, and excellence in the field of AI, while strengthening ties between Tunisian talents in Tunisia and internationally. Source: Press Release
