A native of Aleppo, Syria, Rahwan holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is an affiliate faculty at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society. Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of computer science and the social sciences, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the social aspects of artificial intelligence. He led the winning team in the U.S. State Department's Tag Challenge, using social media to locate individuals in remote cities within 12 hours using only their mug shots. Recently, he crowdsourced 30 million decisions from people worldwide about the ethics of AI systems. Rahwan's work has appeared in major academic journals, including Science and PNAS, and features regularly in major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal.