Sara Al-Sayed is a Kendall Fellow at the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Her work focuses on the impact of the fusion of ML/AI with satellite remote sensing data on nuclear stability; the impact of this fusion on arms control agreement verification; and how possible bias in ML/AI training datasets might influence the interpretation of data collected on strategic systems and affect strategic stability.
Before joining UCS, Dr. Al-Sayed was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security (SGS). Her research at SGS focused on technologically-enabled efforts by civil society to monitor nuclear activity. Furthermore, she co-created and currently manages the SGS Curriculum Resources Project that aims to contribute to efforts countering racism and other structures of exclusion and domination in teaching and research on nuclear issues.
Dr. Al-Sayed received her B.Sc. degree from the German University in Cairo, Egypt, M.Sc. degree from Universität Ulm, Germany, and Ph.D. degree from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany – all in communications engineering, with the focus of her Ph.D. dissertation being on statistical data processing. She also holds an M.A. in philosophy of technology from Technische Universität Darmstadt, where her thesis theorizes the relationship between contemporary civil-society nuclear-activity monitoring and the entrenchment of the nuclear order.
Selected publications
S. Al-Sayed, A. Glaser, and Z. Mian. “Societal Verification of Nuclear Disarmament in the 21st Century – A Workshop Report”. In: Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 6.2 (2023), pp. 365–375.
J. Hoster, S. Al-Sayed, F. Biessmann, A. Glaser, K. Hildebrand, I. Moric, and T. V. Nguyen. “Using Game Engines and Machine Learning to Create Synthetic Satellite Imagery for a Tabletop Verification Exercise”. In: Proc. Institute of Nuclear Materials Management Annual Meeting. Vienna, Austria, May 2023. arXiv: 2404.11461v2 [cs.CV].
S. Al-Sayed. “How civil society can help monitor and verify nuclear arms control”. In: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Feb. 23, 2023).
S. Al-Sayed. “Revisiting Societal Verification for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Arms Control: The Search for Transparency”. In: Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 5.2 (2022), pp. 496–506.