Karima Makhlouf

Karima Makhlouf

Researcher and Instructor in Privacy and Fairness in AI

My research focuses on privacy risks, fairness, and trustworthy AI, with particular emphasis on large language models.

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About Me

I am an instructor in the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Doha for Science and Technology (UDST), Doha, Qatar.

My research focuses on ethical and trustworthy artificial intelligence, particularly privacy and fairness in large language models.

Research

Research Interests

  • Trustworthy AI and Responsible AI Deployment
  • Privacy Risks in Large Language Models
  • Privacy-Preserving Technologies
  • Causality from a Fairness Perspective

Ph.D. Thesis: Advancing Ethical and Responsible AI: Exploring Fairness, Privacy, and Explainability through Causal Perspectives

Defense: October 7, 2024

Chair: Daniel AUGOT (Professor, INRIA, CNRS and École polytechnique, France)

Committee:
Catuscia Palamidessi, Professor, supervisor, Inria Paris-Saclay (Comète)
Héber H. Arcolezi, Researcher, co-supervisor, Inria Grenoble (Privatics)
Salvatore RUGGIERI, Professor, University of Pisa
Jean-Michel LOUBES, Professor, Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse
Miguel COUCEIRO, Professor, Université de Lorraine
Sébastien GAMBS, Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal
Michael PERROT, Researcher, Centre INRIA Lille

Academic Service

Area Chair: European Conference on Algorithmic Fairness (ECAF, Formerly EWAF) 2026

Program Committee Member

  • ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT), 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026
  • IEEE Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS), 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026
  • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DAMI), 2021, 2025, and 2026

Research Projects

  • Privacy Assessment and Defense in Large Language Model Pipelines. Mitacs Globalink research project. UDST - Qatar (2025 - Present).
  • Operationalizing Fairness Metrics: Fairness, Equity, and Justice by Design. TAILOR project - France (2021- 2024).
  • Guaranteeing Fairness in Machine Learning Decisions: The Impact on Privacy. Cybersecurity Center Research - PMU - Saudi Arabia (2022).
  • Extension of SNORT Intrusion Detection System. Université Laval - Canada (2006).

Teaching

Courses taught include:

Selected Publications

  1. Karima Makhlouf, Lamiaa Basyoni, Syed Khaderi, Gabriel Marquez, Peter Sotomango, Mahmoud Awawdah, and Sami Zhioua. On the Privacy of LLMs: An Ablation Study . arXiv, 2026.
  2. Karima Makhlouf, Tamara Stefanovic, Héber H. Arcolezi, and Catuscia Palamidessi. A Systematic and Formal Study of the Impact of Local Differential Privacy on Fairness: Preliminary Results . Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), 2024.
  3. Karima Makhlouf, Sami Zhioua, and Catuscia Palamidessi. When Causality Meets Fairness: A Survey . Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming (JLAMP), 2024.
  4. Karima Makhlouf, Héber H. Arcolezi, Sami Zhioua, Ghassen Ben Ibrahim, and Catuscia Palamidessi. On the Impact of Multi-Dimensional Local Differential Privacy on Fairness . European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), Journal Track of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2024.
  5. Héber H. Arcolezi, Karima Makhlouf, and Catuscia Palamidessi. (Local) Differential Privacy has NO Disparate Impact on Fairness . 37th IFIP Annual Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy (DBSec), 2023. Best Paper Award
  6. Guilherme Alves, Fabien Bernier, Miguel Couceiro, Karima Makhlouf, Catuscia Palamidessi, and Sami Zhioua. Survey on Fairness Notions and Related Tensions . EURO Journal on Decision Processes, 2023.
  7. Ruta Binkytė-Sadauskienė, Karima Makhlouf, Carlos Pinzón, Sami Zhioua, and Catuscia Palamidessi. Causal Discovery for Fairness . Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 2023. Presented at the NeurIPS Workshop, 2022.
  8. Karima Makhlouf, Sami Zhioua, and Catuscia Palamidessi. Identifiability of Causal-based Machine Learning Fairness Notions . 14th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN), 2022.
  9. Karima Makhlouf, Sami Zhioua, and Catuscia Palamidessi. Machine Learning Fairness Notions: Bridging the Gap with Real-World Applications . Information Processing & Management, Volume 58, Issue 5, 2021.
  10. Karima Makhlouf, Sami Zhioua, and Catuscia Palamidessi. On the Applicability of Machine Learning Fairness Notions . ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, Volume 23, Issue 1, June 2021, pp. 14–23.
  11. Lobna Amouri, Nada Chaaban, Karima Makhlouf, and Nahla El-Haggar. Exam Questions Classification Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy: Approaches and Techniques . International Conference on Computer and Information Sciences (ICCIS), 2020.
  12. A. Qasem, Sami Zhioua, and Karima Makhlouf. Finding a Needle in a Haystack: The Traffic Analysis Version . Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2019.
View All Publications on Google Scholar

Personal

For research collaborations, academic activities or teaching enquiries, you can contact me through email or my professional profiles.

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