On October 9, 2025, Der Divan – The Arab Cultural House, in cooperation with the Center for Humans & Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin) and Hamad Bin Khalifa University (Doha, Qatar), opened the two-day symposium “Cross-Cultural Artificial Intelligence.”
The first day was dedicated to the academic community with a full-day “School on AI & Culture,” bringing together MSc and PhD students from Germany and abroad. The program focused on how artificial intelligence can be designed to reflect and respect cultural diversity.
The day began with Dr. Mengchen Dong (Max Planck Institute for Human Development), who introduced the theoretical and methodological foundations of culturally informed AI systems. Prof. Mustafa Jarrar (Hamad Bin Khalifa University & Birzeit University) followed with a lecture on the linguistic and semantic diversity essential to AI development.
After lunch, Prof. Ingmar Weber (Saarland University) delivered an inspiring session titled “Can You See Culture from Space?”, exploring how satellite imagery and computer vision can reveal cultural and social patterns across the globe. The day concluded with Dr. Rafiya Javed (Google DeepMind), whose talk “Exploring AI Reasoning on Human Rights Scenarios in Localized Cultural Contexts” encouraged reflection on the ethical and human rights implications of AI in different cultural settings.
The event offered young researchers valuable insights and a rich space for interdisciplinary dialogue — a promising start to a symposium that puts cultural diversity at the heart of AI research.
