محمود البستان Mahmoud AlBustan

Mahmoud AlBustan is from Kuwait City and studies Computer Engineering at the American University of Kuwait (AUK), specialising in artificial intelligence. What marks him out is that he finishes things: IslamTools, a privacy-first Islamic companion app built in Flutter and released on both iOS and Android; Codewords, a party game past thirty thousand downloads with AI running live inside the game engine; and Bioverse, a space-biology research engine that answers only from NASA datasets and six hundred peer-reviewed studies, built on retrieval-augmented generation so that it cannot invent an answer.

In November 2025 he took first place in the generative-AI track of the Gulf Bank Datathon, from a field of 350. A month later he took first place in the student track of Kuwait's national Cybersecurity CTF, run by the National Cyber Security Center and CODED with Hack The Box, leading his team through 30 of the 37 challenges. In 2026 he joined the KFAS and Huawei Future Tech Industry Engagement Program, which took him from Kuwait to China; his group there won the Huawei Global Training Center's Excellent Group Award, and he was his group's nominee for Excellent Individual.

The same programme is where Isharatna (إشارتنا) started, using AI to improve access to Kuwaiti Sign Language. Looking at the problem properly, the team found the gap was deeper than an app: there is no widely available, expert-validated, reusable Kuwaiti Sign Language dataset, benchmark or model that a student or researcher in Kuwait can build on. So they did that groundwork instead.

On Nubadir he builds the backend, the infrastructure and this website: accounts, attendance verification, storage and releases. His own line for it is that every problem has a simpler solution, and he enjoys finding it.