University students in Lebanon are facing war superimposed on a prolonged national crisis, creating an urgent need for scalable tools to detect mental health problems early. We used machine learning (ML) to predict depression, anxiety, and perceived stress among students during the 2024 war in Lebanon, compare algorithms, identify key predictors, and assess how clinical cut-offs influence performance. We conducted a cross-sectional online survey among 225 students at the American University of Beirut. Outcomes were measured using PHQ-9, GAD-7, and PSS-10 with moderate and severe thresholds. Predictors included sociodemographic, lifestyle, conflict-related, and psychosocial variables. Nine supervised algorithms were trained using stratified train–test splits, cross-validated tuning, and balanced versus SMOTE-enhanced pipelines. Models were selected primarily using test-set PR-AUC, with recall as a secondary criterion, and were additionally evaluated using ROC-AUC, Brier scores, and calibration curves. Symptoms were highly prevalent: 61.3% screened positive for moderate-to-severe depression, 59.6% for anxiety, and 73.3% for stress; 27–35% met severe thresholds. Balanced Random Forest performed best for depression and anxiety (PR-AUC 0.93 and 0.88), and balanced calibrated AdaBoost for stress (PR-AUC 0.95), with improved calibration for anxiety and stress. Key predictors included declines in healthy eating, sleep, and physical activity; greater social media use; higher avoidance and lower approach coping; larger household size; and fear for personal and family safety. These exploratory findings highlight the promise of interpretable ML for advancing early mental health risk detection in conflict-affected universities, provided that future studies confirm performance in larger and independent samples. (Access to the Article)

What kind of world is Artificial Intelligence building—and for whom?
As AI technologies rapidly reshape our societies, economies, and bodies, Shaping AI: Ethics, Society, and the Future of Technology brings together a diverse array of scholars to interrogate the promises, politics, and perils of AI from critical, inclusive, and interdisciplinary perspectives.
Spanning three major sections--Foundations and Applications, Philosophical and Critical Perspectives, and Ethics, Governance, and Social Impact—this volume explores the deep entanglements of AI with disability, gender, race, capitalism, coloniality, and the environment. Chapters examine real-world applications from health systems and biometric surveillance to transport and platform economies, while others engage with philosophical frameworks and decolonial theories to rethink what responsible AI means today.
Contributors from across disciplines and geographies interrogate the very foundations of AI, highlight its ethical blind spots, and offer bold visions for technology that centers justice, equity, and human dignity. Whether you are a scholar, policymaker, student, or technologist, this book offers the critical tools to rethink AI not just as innovation—but as a site of struggle for a more just future. (Book website)

What does it mean to build Artificial Intelligence for a just world—and for whom is justice imagined?
As AI systems deepen their reach into health care, education, borders, social media, and intimate life, AI for a Just World: Power, Liberation, and the People Left Behind gathers a bold interdisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners to ask hard questions about equity, oppression, and technological futures.
Spanning four wide-ranging sections--Artificial Intelligence and the Pursuit of Equity; Disability Justice and the Limits of Technoableism; Gender, Violence, and Social Reproduction; and Coloniality, Liberation, and Other Ways of Knowing—this volume travels from the clinic to the cloud, from the classroom to the border, to expose how power and discrimination are reproduced in algorithmic design and deployment. Chapters rethink fairness in medical AI, challenge ableist frameworks in STEM and higher education, interrogate misogyny and violence encoded into digital platforms, and confront the colonial logics structuring migration control and geopolitical analysis.
Contributors also chart pathways forward: equity-by-design in health systems, disability-centered approaches to AI development, Indigenous relational ethics, and posthumanist possibilities for reimagining our relationship with intelligent technologies.
Provocative and visionary, AI for a Just World provides critical tools for scholars, technologists, policymakers, and activists determined to ensure that AI does not merely innovate—but liberates. (Book website)

"Research on blocking inflammation in gout by Ali Abdul-Sater, associate professor in the Faculty of Health, has been named one of Arthritis Society Canada’s top 10 research advances of 2023" (read more).

Dr. Christo El Morr publishes the 2nd edition of his book "Introduction to Health Informatics: a Canadian Perspective"

"The first resource of its kind, Introduction to Health Informatics examined the effects of health informatics on healthcare practitioners, patients, and policies from a distinctly Canadian perspective. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect current trends and innovations in health informatics and includes new figures, charts, tables, and web links" (the publisher). 

“This health informatics textbook keeps pace with the rapidly evolving field, providing a thorough overview of the key foundational concepts within the field and their interactions with people, networks, systems, and the field of healthcare, while also integrating future applications and technology (machine learning and AI) that will ensure readers have the most current knowledge in the field. The many practical assignments, reflective activities, and interviews provide unique opportunities for application based learning.”Pria Nippak, PhD, Associate Professor and Academic Coordinator, School of Health Services Management and Health Informatics Certificate, Toronto Metropolitan University

“A highly interactive textbook that engages students in foundational concepts of health informatics. By weaving together his experiences, research findings, practical models and exercises within each chapter, Christo El Morr provides a treasure trove for us in and out of the classroom. He has produced a text that is stimulating, fun to read, and highly relevant in the rapidly evolving field of health informatics. A must-read!”
Theresa Mudge, MHA, CHE, Professor, Health Informatics, Sault College

CLAF members, professors Christo El Morr, Manar Jammal, Hossam Ali-Hassan published a new book co-authored with Mr. Walid El-Hallak.

Book summary: In modern business, it is important to learn and understand the various data analytics approaches. But you cannot do that without a solid understanding of machine learning algorithms.
​
If you are new to Machine Learning and its applications, then this book is for you. This book covers fundamental concepts in Machine Learning in a friendly and easy-to-understand language with hands-on examples that you can implement right away.

Link to the book website

"Élie Bou Assi, a researcher in the Neuroscience Research Theme, has been recognized by the Brain Canada Foundation as one of 20 Future leaders in Canadian Brain Research.This important mark of recognition comes with a $100,000 grant over two years. With the 19 other Canadian award recipients, Élie Bou Assi will set out to explore bold avenues of research to refine our understanding of the brain’s workings.
Since 2019, Brain Canada has launched its Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research funding competition every year to support researchers starting their careers, namely, within five years of starting their first independent research position at a university.
This program is funded by Health Canada through the Canada Brain Research Fund and is financially supported by the Azrieli Foundation, with support from the Alvin Segal Family Foundation, The Arrell Family Foundation, The Barry and Laurie Green Family Charitable Trust, and The Erika Legacy Foundation." (​Centre de recherche du CHUM (CRCHUM) )
​

Mohamad Sawan is an international authority on biomedical engineering. He is credited with several major breakthroughs, including chip-integrated implantable devices for the measurement and electrical stimulation of the visual cerebral cortex in order to restore sight to the blind, work that has received international recognition. His scientific contributions have been applied in a variety of specialties including audiology, urology, respirology, vision, epilepsy, and limb movement.
Read more here

CLAF member Dr. Rula Jurdi publishjes a new collelction of poems. 

رلى الجردي، ما بعد الوردة، دار التكوين، دمشق،٢٠٢٢

أفلامُ المدنِ نسخةٌ
عن القلبِ، طاحِنة.

معدَّاتُ الحفرِ
تستيقظُ لتدفنَ نُجومًا
لطيفةَ المعشر.

بغدادُ الشوارعُ
توبِّخُ المشيةَ. الحبُّ
يتفرَّغُ للانقسام.

(من قصيدة "بلا كيف")​

"Research by Ali Abdul-Sater, a York Research Chair in the Regulatory Mechanisms of Inflammation, and an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science, Faculty of Health, has determined that a specific protein, TRAF1, holds the key to controlling inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis and a specific mutation to the protein can reduce the amount of inflammation the joints experience. With funding from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Arthritis Foundation and York University, Abdul-Sater and his research team are currently testing their findings in mice and hope the results will eventually translate to humans." (YFile, York University) Read More here

Professor Mohamad Sawan published a new book titled "Handbook of Biochips: Integrated Circuits and Systems for Biology and Medicine​"

The book was released early in January 2022. It is done to provide readers content related to all types of biochips, including fundamentals of microelectronics and biomaterials interaction with various living tissues, and focusing on biochips at the brain-machine interface.
Published in two volumes, a total of 1340 pages, the 61 chapters are the result of huge efforts spent by a truly international group of experts to offer the best landscape in the field of biochips.

"The book provides a broad survey of the field of biochips, including fundamentals of microelectronics and biomaterials interaction with various, living tissues, as well as numerous, diverse applications. Although a wide variety of biochips will be described, there will be a focus on those at the brain-machine interface. Analysis is included of the relationship between different categories of biochips and their interactions with the body and coverage includes wireless remote control of biochips and arrays of microelectrodes, based on new biomaterials."

https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-1-4614-3447-4