Saudi Arabia has been seeing the emergence of young female leaders, and with this month being dedicated to international women and mothers, it gives us the opportunity to highlight women with impressive achievements in the Kingdom.

Dr. Fatmah Boathman is the first Saudi woman in the Middle East with a PhD in Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI), thus embodying women’s empowerment in the Kingdom and proving the capabilities of women in any field.

She developed her fascination in AI back when she was still a student at the University of Arizona studying the English language, when she was greeted with several computer systems that assisted and helped non-native English speakers.

“I was fascinated by the level of machine communication and interaction,” Dr Baothman explained. “Once I started studying programing and understanding more about the Turing Test, which is a test that’s been designed to test the intelligence of machines, I became fascinated.”

Boathman graduated in 2003 from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of Huddesfield in the UK, where she received her Phd in “Phonology-Based Automatic Speech Recognition for Arabic.” Her work mainly focused on AI and she was introduced to pattern recognition, forecasting, phonology, phonetics, acoustics, machine learning and mathematics.

This sort of work is what can be used in order to enable humans to connect via speech to machines, as well as machines to machines, thus raising the level of intelligence in robotics.

“We worked with a robot and we were able to increase its intelligence from four to seven years,” she exclaimed. “Speech is a very important tool in different applications that could be used in smart cities, smart cars and smartphones — it’s about connecting machines and people, and machines to machines, even if they don’t speak our language, they find a way of communicating in which they can interact with each other.”

“I spent hours trying to figure out how it worked,” she said. “Once I started studying it, I started realizing and building an emotional interest towards the topic. I always had a wish to be a part of the AI community and contribute to such an important discipline.” She added; explaining her interest in machine communication.

Boatham aims at tackling several and different fields through AI, taking economy for instance, she hopes to bring develop solutions for fluctuation issues such as poverty. “I believe that, very soon, AI will play an important role in that,” she noted. “I’m interested in it and I’ve already started forming a group to work on it.”

Boatham started off his career as an advisor for MMG ‘MedLab Media Group’, a startup that focuses on improving clinical practice. And she has also worked as an assistant teacher at the King Abdulaziz University for more than 25 years, in the faculty of computing and IT. Which made also marked her as the first woman to be appointed TA in the university’s computer science department for women.

“It makes me feel very excited to be the first woman with a PhD in Modern AI. We are planning to establish an AI lab in Jeddah very soon to work in blockchain technology, AI projects and other areas, directed towards healthcare.” She added.