Abdullah Bin Sharaf Alghamdi

President of the Saudi Data and AI Authority

President of the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) at ministerial rank, appointed by royal order in 2019. A software engineer by training, he worked as a programmer at GeoServe and as a developer and database manager at the Ministry of Defence and at Saudi Telecom. He led the team that drafted the proposal establishing SDAIA itself, and previously served as director of the National Information Centre, assistant to the general supervisor for government e-transactions, and chairman of the Secure Communications Centre at the Royal Court. He has chaired the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and the Centre of Excellence in Information Assurance, and headed the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones. He sits on the board of King Saud University, where he is a professor in the software engineering department of the College of Computer and Information Sciences.