"AI what you can. Human what you must" - The Annual Women in Data Science Conference at AUB | Njapah Albright

"AI what you can. Human what you must". This statement got me thinking for a few minutes and was the title of my most enjoyed presentation.

On October 28th, 2025, I had the opportunity to attend the Annual Women in Data Science Conference at the American University of Beirut (AUB), that brought together policymakers and women doing amazing things with technology and data from different parts of the globe. If I were to describe the few hours I spent at this day-long conference in a single phrase, I would say it was enriching!

This year's theme was Sustainable Rebuilding in Times of Crisis.

From the opening speeches by renowned members of the AUB community, including the AUB President and the Dean of OSB, to an eye-opening panel discussion featuring ministers from various sectors in the country, here are some of my key takeaways.

• Resilience gets us through the week, but sustainability gets us through the decade.

• Currently, there is usually a ton of paperwork to do when it comes to social development and working with NGOs to make lives better for vulnerable people in the community, but this process can be made easier through employing data science and building systems that automate a majority of these tasks.

• Every ministry is sitting on a lot of data, and digitalizing this data will shift systems from fragmentation to coherence of data. This will help with building more interconnected systems with coherent facts and results, and can improve intercommunication between ministries, at the same time, shortening procedures are reducing ques.

• Healthcare institutions should work together towards building a national healthcare database, because databases that contain healthcare data can provide a whole lot of information that can be used to reshape healthcare access and response. It can also help to reduce cues at hospitals, ensuring that healthcare response is timely. One interesting project the Minister of Public Health mentioned was a system that is being developed for people to be able to detect if a drug has been approved by the Ministry or not before consumption. This is just one out of many interesting innovations that can be made possible with the availability of useful data.

• Educational institutions should graduate more people in tech so that they can contribute to building the sustainable future with the technology that we all envision.

We had a networking break and then dived into the next session with Oumaima Talouka, which turned out to be my favourite session of the day. During her session, she highlighted the importance of putting humans at the centre of innovation even when innovating with AI.

• Did you know that fingerprints change with ageing? (Yeah, I didn't know until yesterday!) When the human in the picture is not taken fully into consideration, AI innovation will be met with so many roadblocks. AI must speak the language of its people; if not it would be unable to serve the people it's built for.

Whew! That's a lot of information, I know, but if there's one thing I carried with me from the WiDS Conference 2025, it's the fact that we need to start building our own databases if we truly want to build solutions that work for us.