Lina El-Malak

Palestinian tech entrepreneur creating AI solutions to preserve endangered languages and cultural heritage

Lina El-Malak is a visionary Palestinian technologist and founder of Dialectics AI, a startup using artificial intelligence to preserve endangered languages and cultural heritage. Born in Nablus in 1992, she developed a passion for digital preservation while studying computer science at Birzeit University. In 2020, she created the first AI-powered Palestinian Arabic dialect preservation system, which now contains over 10 million audio recordings of traditional Palestinian dialects.

Her most significant contribution came in 2022 with the launch of the HeritageGuard platform, an AI system that identifies and digitizes endangered cultural artifacts using satellite imagery and machine learning. This technology has helped UNESCO document 200 endangered heritage sites in Palestine and Jordan since 2023. El-Malak's 2024 paper "AI as Cultural Guardian" in Nature Sustainability outlined breakthrough methods for preserving intangible cultural heritage through digital twins.

In 2025, her team developed the world's first AI-generated virtual reality tours of historic Palestinian villages erased during the Nakba, allowing global audiences to experience these sites virtually. This initiative won the UNESCO Digital Heritage Prize and inspired similar projects in Syria and Lebanon. El-Malak's work is profiled in the 2025 documentary "Code and Culture: The Lina El-Malak Story" on Netflix, which follows her journey from Nablus to Silicon Valley and back.

Her TEDxJerusalem talk "How AI Is Saving Our Cultural Memory" has become a standard reference in digital preservation studies. El-Malak currently leads the Arab Digital Heritage Network, a coalition of 15 Middle Eastern countries using AI to document endangered traditions. Her pioneering work is detailed in the 2025 book Guardians of the Dialect: Saving Culture in the Digital Age, which explores her innovative approaches to cultural preservation.