About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in computational political science at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (Rabat, Morocco).

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My Work

I’m fascinated by the way people think and act in relation to politics. I’ve gone from Cote d’Ivoire, Lebanon, Montreal, Toronto, and now Morocco in the aim to better understand it. After delving into the theory and historical side of politics with my BA and MA, I focused on big data and language models during my PhD in order to find trends, patterns and causes in the way people behave politically. For this reason, my regional expertise lies in the Middle East and North Africa region but my scientific research cuts across various countries.

Today, I am reconnecting with maybe my oldest interest in the study of politics–the quantitative study of how people do politics and culture, across very large time components. This is akin to what is done by some colleagues in Historical Political Economy, Quantitative History, or more recently some of the work done by Complexity Studies people. I am very excited about this kind of work because it explores large time related dynamics that mainly escape the human eye and therefore does not simply tests intuitions anybody could have. In other words, it brings real novelty to our understanding of politics, with rigorous scientific methods. I am also very excited about this kind of work because it is heavily multidisciplinary, and I am convinced that some of the most important innovations to come through science and academia are multidisciplinary in nature. Such as Geoffrey Hinton’s pursuit of a once fringe approach to machine learning and AI by trying to design thinking machine architecture around the human brain–the best apparatus we humans have ever seen in nature, for thinking. Works with a variety of other disciplines, such as neuroscientists, allowed him to move forward there. I believe that for the study of politics such collaborations with other disciplines can help us move our understanding of human societies forward. I personally do so mostly with mathematicians, computer scientists, and physics-related scholars–as can be seen from my coauthor lists.

​In the past, I led a team of researchers between political and computer sciences to generate measures of social movement activities and predict events like protests using social media data. This work was published in Sociological Methods & Research, and the business side of this project briefly formalized into the start-up “Maidan“.  

On the topic of migration, I worked during fiscal year 2020-2021 with the Social Development team of Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank to write a paper on the impact of COVID19 on attitudes toward Refugees in Turkey. Co authors and I used Google Mobility data for Turkey along with Twitter posts about refugees during the pandemic to test the contact theory of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Prior to my current appointments, I pursued my PhD in political science at the University of Toronto (Canada) where I was a Junior Fellow at Massey College for the duration of my doctoral studies.

My research was generously supported by DFID-UNHCR-World Bank group. I was also lucky to count on the support of the University of Toronto–Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)– and the Social Science Research Council of Canada–Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship Program (Doctoral Scholarship).