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Abdigani Diriye

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Abdigani Diriye
Born1986
NationalitySomali
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisSearch interfaces for known-item and exploratory search tasks (2012)
Doctoral advisor
  • Prof. Ann Blandford
  • Dr. Anastasios Tombros

Abdigani Diriye (born 1986[1]) is a Somali computer scientist and research scientist at IBM Research – Africa,[2] working in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), data mining and financial technology (FinTech). Diriye was named a TEDGlobal 2017 fellow,[3] an MIT Technology Review 'Innovator Under 35',[1] and a 'Next Einstein Forum' fellow.[4]

Education

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Abdigani Diriye was schooled in the United Kingdom, moving from Somalia at age 5 due to civil unrest.[4][1] Diriye received a Bachelor's degree in Computer science and Mathematics from Queen Mary University of London. Continuing onto the postgraduate level, Diriye earned a Master's in Advanced Computing from King's College London, a PhD in Computer Science at University College London in 2012 and an MBA from INSEAD in 2022.[5]

Research and career

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Under the guidance of Prof. Ann Blandford and Dr. Anastasios Tombros, Diriye conducted his PhD research on understanding the role searching interfaces play in the process of information seeking.[6][7][8]

Diriye, during his PhD, undertook internships with Microsoft Research (June 2010 - October 2011) and Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto labs (June 2011).[4][2]

Following his PhD, Diriye worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.[9] This position, working with Dr. Aniket Kittur led Diriye to develop new approaches that combine human and machine-generated data that helps people find and understand information on the internet more effectively.[2][10]

Currently Diriye is a research scientist and manager at IBM Research Africa and steers Innovate Ventures: a startup technology fund in Somalia, having founded it in 2012.[4][11][1] With Innovate Ventures, Diriye has partnered with Oxfam, VC4Africa, and Telesom. Diriye, through Innovate Ventures, has funded over $17,500 towards startups in Africa.[1]

With IBM, Diriye and his team develop and deploy new approaches to securely mine, model and score individuals who are applying for financial loans. In 2016, Diriye and his team developed a machine learning approach that leverages new data sources to evaluate financial profiles and credit scores of hundreds of millions of Africans.[4]

Over his career, Diriye has published over 35 patents and papers.[2]

Awards

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  • TEDGlobal 2017[12]
  • Next Einstein Fellow (NEF) 2017-2019 [4]
  • MIT Technology Review 'TR35' 2017 [1]
  • Quartz Africa Innovators 2018 [13]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f "This scientist's organization provides resources to train and support Somali techies". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  2. ^ a b c d "Abdigani M. Diriye - IBM". researcher.watson.ibm.com. 2016-07-25. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  3. ^ "Meet the TEDGlobal 2017 Fellows". TED Blog. 2017-05-23. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  4. ^ a b c d e f "Abdigani Diriye". Next Einstein Forum. 2017-09-11. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  5. ^ Centre, UCLIC-UCL Interaction (2 June 2017). "Congratulations to Abdi Diriye". UCLIC - UCL Interaction Centre. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  6. ^ Diriye, Abdigani; Blandford, Ann; Tombros, Anastasios; Vakkari, Pertti (2013). Aalberg, Trond; Papatheodorou, Christos; Dobreva, Milena; Tsakonas, Giannis; Farrugia, Charles J. (eds.). "The Role of Search Interface Features during Information Seeking" (PDF). Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 8092. Springer Berlin Heidelberg: 235–240. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-40501-3_23. ISBN 9783642405013.
  7. ^ Diriye, Abdigani; Blandford, Ann; Tombros, Anastasios (2010). Lalmas, Mounia; Jose, Joemon; Rauber, Andreas; Sebastiani, Fabrizio; Frommholz, Ingo (eds.). "Exploring the Impact of Search Interface Features on Search Tasks". Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 6273. Springer Berlin Heidelberg: 184–195. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15464-5_20. ISBN 9783642154645.
  8. ^ Diriye, Abdigani; Blandford, Ann; Tombros, Anastasios (2009). "A polyrepresentational approach to interactive query expansion". Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries. JCDL '09. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 217–220. doi:10.1145/1555400.1555434. ISBN 9781605583228. S2CID 16645428.
  9. ^ "HCII Seminar". Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. 2013-09-25. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  10. ^ Kittur, Aniket; Peters, Andrew M.; Diriye, Abdigani; Telang, Trupti; Bove, Michael R. (2013). "Costs and benefits of structured information foraging". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '13. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 2989–2998. doi:10.1145/2470654.2481415. ISBN 9781450318990. S2CID 16887917.
  11. ^ "Our Story Is..." innovate.so. Archived from the original on 2016-11-29. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  12. ^ Torera Idowu, for (23 May 2017). "Meet the 10 African trailblazers on the TEDGlobal 2017 list". CNN. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  13. ^ "Quartz Africa Innovators 2018: A list of 30 pioneers". Quartz. 20 September 2018. Retrieved 20 May 2022.
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