"Contrary to the common misperception, Fiqh has a long history of engagement with contemporary sciences which has characterized its ability to react to changes in society over the course of the last fourteen centuries. One of the preeminent societal transformation in the 21 st century is the penetration of algorithms and AI based systems in all aspects of society e.g., most people in the world now get their knowledge from search engines powered by algorithms, driverless cars are also powered by AI, algorithms that are used to sentence criminals, algorithms for evaluating evidence etc. These examples constitute cases which have traditionally been the purview of fiqh. In this talk, I will highlight the challenge of algorithmic society to Islamic law and how insights history of fiqh can help not just Muslims but the wider world resolve many challenges facing the machine learning and Artificial Intelligence community."

*Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad is an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Washington and the Principal Data Scientist at KenSci Inc, a startup focused on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare. He is also an official advisor on AI and Machine Learning to the ministry of Science and Technology in Maldives. Muhammad Aurangzeb has written more than 50 research papers on machine learning, artificial intelligence and computational social science including two best paper awards. In the past he was also a Visiting Research Scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology – Kanpur and was a research affiliate in the Center for Cognitive Science at University of Minnesota. He has a PhD and masters in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, his undergraduate degree is also in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis was on modeling human behavior in massive online games.  Most recently Muhammad Aurangzeb was on multiple panels on AI Governance at the Global Governance summit in Dubai. His research work has been extensively covered in the media in the West. His current research is in interpretable machine learning, application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Healthcare, Massive Historical Social Networks and Personality Emulation.

*The meeting will be held in English without translation.