Saudi AI chief reviews crowd management tech in Makkah
Abdullah Al-Ghamdi explores advanced technologies for Grand Mosque operations and highway security
Updated 26 March 2025
Arab News
RIYADH: Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority President Abdullah Al-Ghamdi has visited the Grand Mosque Operations Center in Makkah, the Saudi Press Agency reported.
He met the director of Public Security and chairman of the Hajj Security Committee, Lt. Gen. Mohammed Al-Bassami, along with several security officials and Saudi programmers from the authority working at the center.
Al-Ghamdi reviewed the operations of the Baseer platform, developed by the authority in collaboration with the Ministry of Interior, represented by Public Security.
The platform uses computer vision and AI to monitor and analyze the movement of visitors to the Grand Mosque, ensuring smooth crowd management and assisting in locating missing persons.
He also reviewed the Sawaher platform, designed to enhance the safety of the Grand Mosque, contributing to a secure and smart environment that facilitates worshippers and Umrah performers in performing their rituals seamlessly.
Al-Ghamdi also visited the Highway Security Center in Al-Shumaisi, where he was briefed on the Banan device, which enhances identity verification using biometric features.
He observed the center’s operations, the command room and the advanced technology used in the Saudi Lucid vehicle, which is equipped with AI tools.
Saudi, UK foreign ministers discuss regional developments
Updated 6 sec ago
Arab News
LONDON: Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan met in London with UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Friday to discuss ties and regional developments, the foreign ministry announced.
The meeting touched on areas of joint cooperation and ongoing efforts to address regional challenges, the ministry added.
Prince Musab bin Mohammed Al-Farhan, advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Political Affairs, was also present.
The talks come ahead of next week’s Saudi-French conference on Palestine in New York, where international officials will seek to revive momentum for a two-state solution and outline steps toward Palestinian statehood.
Palestinian child arrives in Saudi Arabia for treatment under King Salman’s directives
Updated 13 June 2025
Arab News
RIYADH: Palestinian Mohammed Khaled Hijazi, 7, arrived in the Kingdom on Thursday with his parents to receive medical care and was immediately transferred to the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Riyadh.
The supervisor general at the Saudi aid agency KSrelief, Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeeah, thanked King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the humanitarian initiative to treat the Palestinian boy in the Kingdom.
Al-Rabeeah said that Hijazi lost his right eye while his left eye was severely damaged by an explosion while he was playing with friends near their house, which was completely destroyed, in the Jabalia camp, north of Gaza, last month.
The supervisor general prayed for the boy’s speedy recovery and for the Palestinian people to be relieved of their suffering.
He clarified that this initiative is a continuation of the relief and humanitarian efforts provided by the Kingdom to the Palestinian people in times of crisis and adversity, particularly the most vulnerable categories, such as children, who innocently pay the price of conflicts.
Al-Rabeeah also saidthat the initiative is part of the humanitarian approach adopted by the Kingdom toward needy peoples through KSrelief, which does not discriminate based on gender, race, or religion, and is fundamentally rooted in noble human principles of compassion and human solidarity.
The Palestinian boy’s parents expressed their appreciation and gratitude to the Kingdom for treating their son, affirming that this brotherly gesture is not unusual from the Kingdom’s leadership, which has always been known for its honorable stance in support of the Palestinian people.
Wrapped in gratitude: How Saudi women are redefining post-Hajj gift culture
Updated 13 June 2025
Waad Hussain
RIYADH: In Saudi Arabia, the end of Hajj doesn’t simply mark the conclusion of a sacred pilgrimage — it opens the door to another cherished tradition.
Gift-giving, known locally as hadiyat al-hajj or “the pilgrim’s gift,” is a gesture that turns a personal journey into a shared blessing. For many, it is an expression of faith, gratitude and love.
While classics like Zamzam water and dates still hold their place, a new generation of Saudi women is redefining this tradition, infusing it with creative spirit, personal stories and intentional detail. From custom packaging to symbolic items and handwritten notes, Hajj gifts today are becoming more than a token — they’re a continuation of the spiritual journey itself.
“I didn’t want to just hand someone a plastic bottle and say, ‘I went’,” said Nawal Al-Subaie, aged 30. “So I put together small bundles with Zamzam water, engraved tasbeeh and handwritten du’a cards for each friend. It was my way of letting them in on the experience.”
The gifts now often carry symbolic meaning — a fragrance that evokes the air of Arafat, prayer cards reflecting moments of silence in Muzdalifah, or a simple stamped tag reading “Hajj Mabroor” in hand-drawn calligraphy. The items are chosen with care, often representing moments that shaped the pilgrim’s heart.
For Dana Al-Hamdan, 26, the most powerful way to preserve the feeling of Hajj was through images. Instead of giving traditional gifts, she printed instant film photographs she took throughout her pilgrimage, labeled with the exact date and time.
“I gave them to my twin sister,” she said. “One was from Arafat just before Maghrib, another from the moment I arrived in Mina. They weren’t staged — they were raw and personal.”
The emotional weight of that gesture lingered far beyond the exchange.
“She kept one photo in her wallet and the other on her desk.” Al-Hamdan said.
This new take on hadiyat al-hajj is trending on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Videos show everything from Hajj-themed gift boxes and laser-cut Qur’anic bookmarks to handmade pouches, scented oils and memory tokens.
But it isn’t about luxury or performance; it’s about thoughtfulness. Many women prepare the gifts in quiet, reflective settings. Some add prayers or verses. Others prepare items based on personal meaning, such as a prayer for healing, a verse for patience, or an object that symbolizes strength.
Latifa Al-Dossari, 27, created sets of prayer beads and placed them inside tiny velvet bags, along with notes describing what that day of Hajj felt like.
“It was like writing someone a letter from Mina,” she said.
What’s happening with these gifts is part of a larger movement, a shift toward a more expressive, emotionally honest form of spirituality. For many Saudi women, especially younger ones, Hajj is not only a rite to fulfill, but a memory to share, a testimony that invites others in.
Some see hadiyat al-hajj as souvenirs, others see them as silent declarations. “I remembered you,” they say. “I carried your name. This was not a journey I took alone.”
The true beauty of this tradition lies in the unspoken energy that surrounds it. These are not mass-produced tokens; they are gifts that hold time, intention, and prayer.
For the women crafting them, the act is a final ritual, a quiet bridge from the pilgrim’s journey back to daily life, but built with du’a, thought and love rather than stone or scripture.
Because, in the end, the real gift isn’t the Zamzam or the photograph or the beads. It’s the sincerity that comes with it — the kind that says: “You were with me, even when I was away.”
Saudi Arabia leads Arab condemnation of Israel attacks on Iran
‘Heinous attacks’ on ‘brotherly’ Iran violates international law
UN, global community must ‘immediately halt this aggression’
Updated 13 June 2025
Arab News
RIYADH: Saudi Arabia led Arab condemnation Israel’s strikes on Iran early on Friday, which targeted multiple sites it linked to the country’s nuclear program and killed at least two top military officers, raising the potential for an all-out war between the two bitter Middle East adversaries.
The strikes killed Hossein Salami, the chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, along with another top IRGC official and two nuclear scientists in the initial raids.
It appeared to be the most significant attack Iran has faced since its 1980s war with Iraq.
Saudi Arabia was the first Arab nation to speak out against the attacks, stating that the Kingdom “expresses its strong condemnation and denunciation of the blatant Israeli aggressions against the brotherly Islamic Republic of Iran, which undermine its sovereignty and security and constitute a clear violation of international laws and norms,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday.
The statement added: “While the Kingdom condemns these heinous attacks, it affirms that the international community and the (UN) Security Council bear a great responsibility to immediately halt this aggression.”
#Statement | The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia expresses its strong condemnation and denunciation of the blatant Israeli aggressions against the brotherly Islamic Republic of Iran, which undermine its sovereignty and security and constitute a clear violation of international laws and… pic.twitter.com/OYuWXwiE5y
The strikes came amid simmering tensions over Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program and appeared certain to trigger a reprisal, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warning that “severe punishment” would be directed at Israel. Hours later, Israel’s military said it had begun intercepting Iranian drones launched in retaliation.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military operation on Iran would “continue for as many days as it takes” to “roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.”
Israel has declared a state of emergency in anticipation of retaliatory missile and drone strikes.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meanwhile warned that Israel would suffer severe consequences after the deadly attacks.
“With this crime, the Zionist regime has set itself for a bitter and painful fate and it will definitely receive it,” Khamenei said in a statement.
Early speculation as to how aware US President Donald Trump was of the attacks soon came to an end after telling Fox News he had received “advanced notice”, stating that “Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb and we are hoping to get back to the negotiating table. We will see.”
Iran later said it would not be attending talks scheduled to take place in Oman.
How emerging AI talent is shaping the future of smart healthcare in Saudi Arabia
HuLP is an AI tool enabling doctors to refine cancer predictions in real-time, improving accuracy and trust
Med-YOLOWorld is a universal AI imaging tool that reads nine medical scan types at 70 frames per second
Updated 13 June 2025
Waad Hussain
RIYADH: As Saudi Arabia accelerates its investment in AI-powered healthcare, two young researchers from the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence are building the very tools that hospitals in the Kingdom will soon need — intelligent, interpretable, and scalable systems for diagnosis and prognosis.
Although the university’s 2025 cohort did not include Saudi nationals this year, the work of two standout graduates, Mohammed Firdaus Ridzuan and Tooba Tehreem Sheikh, directly aligns with Saudi Arabia’s healthcare transformation plans under Vision 2030.
Their research offers practical, forward-looking solutions for the Kingdom’s next generation of smart hospitals.
At a time when AI systems are being deployed across diagnostic units in Saudi hospitals, from the King Faisal Specialist Hospital to new initiatives backed by the Saudi Data and AI Authority, the focus is shifting from capability to clarity.
Can the systems provide real-time support? Can they explain their reasoning? Can doctors intervene? These are the questions both Ridzuan and Sheikh have set out to answer.
Ridzuan, a PhD graduate in machine learning, developed Human-in-the-Loop for Prognosis, or HuLP for short — a cancer survival prediction system that places doctors back at the center of AI-powered decision-making.
Mohammed Firdaus Ridzuan. (Supplied)
“While AI has made significant strides in diagnosing diseases, predicting individual survival outcomes, especially in cancer, is still a challenging task,” Ridzuan told Arab News. “Our model addresses this by enabling real-time clinician intervention.”
Unlike traditional models that operate in isolation, HuLP is built for collaboration. Medical professionals can adjust and refine its predictions using their clinical expertise. These adjustments are not just temporary; they influence how the model evolves.
“Doctors and medical professionals can actively engage with the system,” Ridzuan said. “Their insights don’t just influence the result — they actually help the model learn.”
This approach to human-AI partnership ensures that predictions remain explainable, context-aware, and grounded in patient-specific realities, a key need for Saudi hospitals integrating AI at scale.
“By allowing clinicians to dynamically adjust predictions, we create a more adaptive and responsive system that can handle local challenges,” Ridzuan added.
The Kingdom’s healthcare institutions are undergoing a digital transformation driven by national entities like SDAIA, the Ministry of Health, and the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Innovation.
The Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund, and KFSHI aigned a partnership in 2024 to commercialize GenAI. (Supplied)
These entities are focused not only on adopting new AI tools but also on ensuring that these systems can integrate into clinical workflows. This is where Ridzuan sees HuLP making an impact.
“Smart hospitals are already integrating AI diagnostic tools for medical imaging and patient data analysis,” he said. “Our model can take this to the next level by empowering clinicians to interact with and guide the system’s predictions.”
In settings where trust and transparency are vital, Ridzuan’s collaborative model could help hospitals overcome one of AI’s most persistent problems: the black box effect.
This refers to the opaque nature of certain systems, particularly in the field of AI, where the internal workings and decision-making processes are hidden or unknown.
The emphasis on local relevance also comes through in HuLP’s design. Ridzuan says real-time data from regional healthcare systems is essential for training accurate, context-sensitive models.
“Local data provides insights into the unique health conditions and medical practices within the Gulf region,” he said. “Integrating this data ensures that the AI is attuned to the specific needs and health profiles of patients in the region.
The system is built to learn continuously. As clinicians correct or refine its predictions, the model updates itself, improving with each interaction. This feedback loop is crucial for real-world deployments, especially in the Gulf, where data quality can be inconsistent.
While Ridzuan is focused on outcomes, Sheikh, an MSc graduate in computer vision, is transforming the way hospitals detect disease in the first place.
Her project, Med-YOLOWorld, is a next-generation imaging system that can read nine types of medical scans in real time.
Unlike traditional radiology AI tools, which are often limited to specific tasks, Med-YOLOWorld operates with open-vocabulary detection. That means it can identify anomalies and organ structures that it has not been explicitly trained on — a key feature for scalability.
“Most models are confined to a single modality like CT or X-ray,” Sheikh told Arab News. “Med-YOLOWorld supports nine diverse imaging types, including ultrasound, dermoscopy, microscopy, and histopathology.”
With support for up to 70 frames per second, the system is designed for clinical deployment in high-demand environments.
Sheikh sees clear potential for its use in Saudi Arabia, where institutions like the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre are already implementing multi-modal AI imaging tools.
The Center for Health Intelligence is KFSHRC's arm for Innovating the Future of Healthcare. (Supplied)
“It can seamlessly integrate with existing imaging systems to enable open-vocabulary detection,” she said. “Identifying a wide range of medical findings — even those outside its original training set — is essential for fast-paced clinical environments.”
But building a universal imaging tool came with its own technical hurdles.
“The biggest challenge was managing the diverse preprocessing requirements across imaging modalities,” Sheikh said. “CT and MRI scans need intensity normalization, while ultrasound, dermoscopy, and microscopy have completely different visual characteristics.”
Data imbalance was another issue. While MRI and CT scans are widely available, data for more niche imaging types is scarce. Sheikh tackled this by designing custom augmentation techniques to ensure the model performs consistently across all modalities.
She is now working on combining Med-YOLOWorld with vision-language models, systems that explain what they see in natural language.
“MiniGPT-Med does a great job at explaining radiology images,” she said. “But pairing it with a system like Med-YOLOWorld adds a crucial dimension — open-world localization. Not just describing the issue but pointing to it.”
This fusion could create a powerful end-to-end diagnostic pipeline: detect, explain, and localize. For Saudi hospitals embracing AI-driven imaging, the impact could be transformative.
Tooba Tehreem Sheikh. (Supplied)
For Sheikh, the global implications of her work are just as important as the technical achievements. “Med-YOLOWorld reduces the need for large, annotated datasets,” she said. “In fast-scaling healthcare systems, that’s a game-changer.”
By enabling the detection of unseen categories, the system can remain relevant even as new diseases or anomalies emerge. And when combined with language models, it can assist in medical training, annotations, and decision support, all while reducing dependence on expert-labeled data.
This approach could accelerate AI adoption in emerging regions, including across the Gulf and the wider Middle East and North Africa, where access to large datasets and AI-specialized radiologists remains limited.
While MBZUAI is based in the UAE, its alumni are playing a growing role in shaping AI initiatives that extend across the Gulf. Both Ridzuan and Sheikh have demonstrated how innovation, when aligned with clinical realities and regional goals, can scale far beyond the lab.
As Saudi Arabia continues to invest in smart hospitals, real-time imaging, and personalized care, tools like HuLP and Med-YOLOWorld represent the next wave of AI in healthcare: explainable, collaborative, and regionally adaptable.
And with growing partnerships between research institutions, healthcare providers, and government entities, these systems may not be far from deployment in the Kingdom, paving the way for a more intelligent, human-centered approach to medical care.