Fatmah Baothman is a Saudi Arabian computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher who is the first woman in the Middle East with a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, which she earned from the University of Huddersfield.^[1] She is the board president for the Artificial Intelligence Society.^[2] Baothman has worked for over 25 years as, and is currently, an assistant professor at the King Abdulaziz University Faculty of Computing & Information Technology, where she established the women's Department that served as the foundation of the Computer Science College, and became the first teaching assistant faculty member.^[5,3]

In 2003, Baothman earned her Ph.D. from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of Huddersfield in the United Kingdom, and was awarded with distinction.^[5,6] Her dissertation consisted of an AI application in "phonology-based automatic speech recognition for Arabic".^[6] In 2026, the University of Huddersfield announced that Baothman would receive an honorary doctorate in July 2026.^[7]

Baothman became the chairwoman of the IEEE Women in Engineering Western Region. She also established the King Abdulaziz University (KAU) IEEE chapter for women and is the president of the Women Engineers Committee for the Saudi Council of Engineers western region.^[6] In 2019, Baothman received the first-ever Women AI Award at the VB AI Summit.^[8]

Her publications include "Phonology-based automatic speech recognition for Arabic" (2002). In 2006, she co-authored "Representing coarticulation processes in Arabic speech" with Michael Ingleby and S Boudelaa. She also co-authored "EMPTY NUCLEI IN ARABIC SPEECH PATTERNS AND THE DIACRITIC SUKU UN" and "Syllabic Markov models of Arabic HMMs of spoken Arabic using CV units" with Michael Ingleby. Additionally, she published "Comparative Study from Several Business Cases and Methodologies for ICT Project Evaluation" in 2016 for ICT project evaluation with co-authors Farrukh Saleem, Naomie Salim, Abdulrahman H Altalhi, AL Abdullah, Zahid Ullah, Fatmah A Baothman, and Muhammad Haleem Junejo.