Portrait of Asma Ben Abacha

Asma Ben Abacha

Senior Applied Scientist

About

Dr. Asma Ben Abacha is a Senior Scientist at Microsoft Health AI. She conducts research and development in Clinical NLP, Computer Vision, Radiology, and Medical AI.

She received a Ph.D. in computer science from Paris-Saclay University (opens in new tab), France. Before joining Microsoft, she worked at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) (opens in new tab) and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) (opens in new tab) on AI/ML projects and developed new models and datasets for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision in the medical domain.

She has published over 90 scientific articles with 6,500+ citations (DBLP (opens in new tab) | Google Scholar (opens in new tab) | ResearchGate (opens in new tab)) and served as Area Chair and reviewer for top conferences and journals in NLP, ML, and medical informatics.

Dr. Ben Abacha launched and co-organized several new competitions in medical NLP/AI that attracted 100+ participating teams such as the international challenges on Medical Question Answering (TREC 2017), Visual Question Answering from Radiology Images (VQA-Med (opens in new tab) 2019-2021), Medical Image Captioning (opens in new tab) @ ImageCLEF (2021-2026), and the MEDIQA shared tasks (opens in new tab) (2019-2026).

She is also a co-organizer of the Clinical NLP workshop (opens in new tab) and co-founder of the North Africans in NLP/ML events & affinity group workshops (e.g., ACL 2021 (opens in new tab) and NeurIPS 2022-2023 (opens in new tab)).

 

Publications:

 

Recent Academic Services (2018-2026):