Muhammed Idris: What refugees need to start new lives
Muhammed Idris wants to improve social services delivery through collective and artificial intelligence. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
30 first cousins,
was actually my mom's cousin
in Montreal as a refugee.
coming to Canada to apply for asylum
the clothes on their back.
since that phone call,
of technologists, researchers and refugees
self-help resources for newcomers.
language, cultural and other barriers
control over their own lives.
the rights and the dignity
is not unique.
are newly displaced
at a local YMCA shelter
and other relatives were sent to
resettlement requires.
you need to find a lawyer
within two weeks.
with a pre-authorized physician,
for a work permit.
for a place to live
any sort of social assistance.
over the past few years,
than there are resources to help them.
with limited resources,
more time waiting in limbo,
to support resettlement efforts,
still don't know
from filling out paperwork
that this information doesn't exist.
bombarded with so much information
to make sense of it all.
just tell me what to do,"
over and over again.
it could be to get your bearings
when I got to Montreal,
himself also a refugee, put it:
is more important than food,
resources and information
between life and death.
resources and information
between life and death.
through your first week
some basic questions
for resources.
a place to stay tonight?
an all-women's shelter?
a custom, step-by-step to-do list
that you need to know,
with a real person who does.
and service organizations
that's necessary to understand
campaigns in Arabic, English,
displaced worldwide.
an additional 140 million people
due to environmental degradation.
there are nearly one billion people
settlements and slums.
challenges of our time.
every single newcomer an advocate.
can amplify existing efforts
on a social safety net
beyond imagination.
the rights and the dignity
resettlement and integration
they need in order to help themselves.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Muhammed Idris - Entrepreneur, investorMuhammed Idris wants to improve social services delivery through collective and artificial intelligence.
Why you should listen
Dr. Muhammed Y. Idris, PhD is a Fellow at Capria, a leading global impact investment firm, and the cofounder and lead developer of Edel Technologies, an organization that build AI-powered tools and products for frontline humanitarian organizations and service providers, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
Inspired by own personal experiences with refugee resettlement, Idris left academia to build the world's first virtual advocate bot, Atar, that 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, Idris started his career in finance at BlackRock and went on to complete a PhD with a focus on 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.
Idris's work has been presented at numerous academic, policy and industry conferences, and he has held teaching and research positions at the University of Washington, The Pennsylvania State University, Concordia University in Montreal as well as Harvard University, where he held a predoctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affair while completing his dissertation.
As a self-taught programmer, Idris enjoys teaching statistics and programming in his spare time. While his current focus in on helping streamline and scale refugee resettlement, his mission is to help improve social services delivery for all through collective and artificial intelligence as an entrepreneur and investor.
Muhammed Idris | Speaker | TED.com