Biography
Amina Al Sherif is the Generative AI Lead for Google Public Sector. Amina focuses on areas such as State and Local Government, Federal and Defense, and has a background in AI Ethics. Amina has experience working with early stage machine learning and AI startups in the defense and intelligence space, and established a 501 c(3) non-profit organization focusing on the crossroads between security (physical, virtual) and AI in the public sector space.
Amina immigrated to the United States in 2010 as a first generation Arab-American, and is a member of the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities as an activist.
Amina She has spent twelve years in the Department of Defense serving as an Army officer in the Reserves and North Carolina National Guard as a tactical cyber operator and cyber targeter. She worked with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) as an Arabic, Farsi, and French language enabled Open Source Exploitation Analyst at Fort Belvoir, VA and Fort Bragg. She deployed under Operation Inherent Resolve to Baghdad, Iraq in 2015/2016. In 2016-2017 she deployed to Afghanistan supporting the Special Operations Community. Most recently Amina deployed to Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Israel for a Special Missions Unit out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina supporting cyber-HUMINT operations.
Amina holds a BA in Linguistics and Arabic from the University of Mississippi and a Masters in Professional Studies in Cybersecurity and Information Sciences from Penn State University. She regularly blogs on Medium documenting her self-taught technical career. In January 2020, she published her first book An Approach to Machine Learning in Cyber Defense for the Department of Defense. She is also working on a three-part young adult fiction novel series and is a published author with her debut novel Nadiri, A Novel Part I. She also blogs regularly on her website, https://www.aminaalsherif.camp .