Social services 2.0: Atar and the future of (social) work

Muhammed Y. Idris is a fellow at leading global impact investment firm Capria and the cofounder and lead developer at Edel Technologies, an organization that builds AI-powered tools and products for frontline humanitarian organizations and service providers, including the United Nation’s Refugee Agency (UNHCR). His mission is to help improve social services delivery for all through collective and artificial intelligence as an entrepreneur and investor. Inspired by his own personal experiences with refugee resettlement, Muhammed left academia to build the world’s first virtual advocate bot, Atar, which empowers refugees and other newcomers with information about what to do, where to go, and what to expect using customized step-by-step guides. Trained as a computational social scientist, he started his career in finance at BlackRock and went on to complete a PhD with a focus on the research and development of open source tools for leveraging socially generating big data and make it easy to digest this complex technical information into actionable insights. His work has been presented at numerous academic, policy, and industry conferences and he has held teaching and research positions at the University of Washington, Penn State, Concordia University in Montreal, and Harvard, where he held a predoctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affair while completing his dissertation. A self-taught programmer, Muhammed enjoys teaching statistics and programming in his spare time.