Mr Waqas Burney, currently the Business Development Manager for Crisis Response, Civics (Asia Pacific) in Product Partnerships at Google APAC in Singapore, has been a part of Google for over eight years. He leads the company’s initiatives in responding to natural disasters across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. His recent work includes deploying Machine Learning-based flood forecasting systems to alert and protect over 100 million people in Bangladesh and utilising ML and satellite imagery for identifying more than 60,000 damaged buildings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh during Pakistan’s floods in 2022. He is actively involved in expanding these AI-based solutions to other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

Mr Burney holds an MBA from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and an engineering degree from the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI), Pakistan.