NEP-AI

First Lt. Hamdan Al-Ali is a System Developer at Dubai Police, a Ph.D. candidate in Natural Language Processing at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, and the Co-founder and CEO of Potion. Across his public-sector, academic, and entrepreneurial work, Hamdan explores how gamification and Al can address underexplored problems in healthcare, education, and social good. Rather than recreating existing solutions, his work focuses on research-driven systems that are culturally relevant, technically grounded, and designed for real-world impact.

At Potion, Hamdan leads a team building Al-powered games with purpose. The company translates this mission into products such as Chatty Check, an Al-powered game for early language disorder screening. Designed for young children, the game uses interactive mini-games, speech recognition, and language analysis to assist speech-language pathologists in mass-screening children for developmental language disorder. Potion has also developed Wordcaster, a gamified speech- based reading game that helps young learners practice reading fluency by pronouncing words aloud.

Hamdan's academic research is shaped by the real-world challenges that emerge from deploying Potion's Al-powered projects. His work examines where current Al systems fall short, from the quality and reliability of speech and language technologies to privacy risks, fairness concerns, and practical deployment limitations. His publications focus on improving these systems and reimagining traditional approaches through smarter, Al-driven alternatives.

Hamdan began developing games in 2014 and started monetizing his projects in 2017, gradually moving from independent game development to collaborations with entities. Alongside his work in games, First Lt. Hamdan developed applied Al and data analytics systems at Dubai Police, including machine learning and natural language processing tools for investigations, predictive analytics dashboards, and Al-driven systems. Over the years, several of his projects have been registered as intellectual works with the UAE Ministry of Economy, reflecting a sustained record of turning innovative ideas into practical systems.