The winners of our department’s senior project contest for 2021-2022 academic year have just been announced. A showcase of spectacular SDP projects took place on May 10, 2022 at QU. The event included live demos and posters’ presentations. Internal examiners and judges from industry evaluated the projects.
Computer Science Winners
First Place: Yousseif Elshahawy, Mohanad Mohamed, and Hesham Zaky, with a project titled “Harassment Heat-Map“. Supervisor is Dr. Mohamad Saleh.
Third Place: Fatma Al-Mansouri, Shaymaa Al-Mohssen, Fatima Al-Khulaifi, and Muneera Al-Naimi, with a project titled “Share“. Supervisor is Dr. Khalid Khan.
Opening the AI Lab as part of the Huawei ICT Academy at QU
Qatar University (QU) has partnered with Huawei to open an AI Lab as part of the Huawei ICT Academy at the university. The collaboration is a further boost to Qatar’s economy, whose National Vision 2030 recognizes talent’s central role in forging a prosperous society.
The Lab was officially opened by Dr. Khalid Al Ali who delivered a keynote speech, as well as Dr. Khalid Naji, Dean of the College of Engineering, QU, and Liam Zhao, CEO, Huawei Gulf North, in the presence of other senior Huawei executives, dignitaries and faculty. The group later toured the state-of-the-art lab equipped with the latest technologies.
The Huawei ICT Academy Lab will train QU students using Huawei equipment to acquire high-level Huawei Certifications in a real environment. It will also support university research programs, provide cutting-edge technology and platforms, and inspire innovation by conducting industry and university collaborative projects and research.
Dr. Khalid Al Ali, assistant undersecretary for higher education in the Ministry of Education and Higher Education said, “We are highly encouraged to see our universities and the private sector coming together to advance education. We recognize that the public sector alone would struggle to meet the talent demand of the digital economy. But forging such partnerships elevate the skillsets of our youth and, in turn, helps build a competitive economy that can respond faster to market demand and global trends.”
Dr. Khalid Naji, Dean of the College of Engineering at QU, said, “As our country’s leading university, we are at the forefront of Qatar’s efforts to develop a highly-skilled labor force. Partnering with Huawei exposes our students to the latest advances in ICT while equipping them with real-world skills that meet the demands of a digital economy. We will continue to explore further areas of cooperation as demand for digital skills accelerates.”
Liam Zhao, CEO of Huawei Gulf North, said, “Huawei has a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship with the State of Qatar and various public and private organizations. The opening of the AI Lab deepens this relationship while helping the country deepen its ICT talent ecosystem. We are confident the ICT Academy and the AI Lab will make a significant contribution in enabling the country to attain its objectives.”
As a leading global ICT solution provider, Huawei advocates for an open, shared ICT talent ecosystem that benefits all parties. Over the past nine years, Huawei has built a talent supply chain covering the entire learning, certification, and employment process by deepening the cooperation mechanism between universities and enterprises, promoting industry development, and innovating talent development models based on enterprise requirements.
Our CSE department was awarded 2 National Priorities Research Project-Standard (NPRP-S) grants from Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) in their 14th cycle. This cycle was so competitive that Qatar University was awarded only 14 projects; 5 of which are awarded to the College of Engineering. The two awarded projects are led by Dr. Tamer Elsayed and Dr. Abdulla Al-Ali.
Dr. Abdulla Al-Ali
The project led by Dr. Abdulla Al-Ali is titled “Defense Against Hardware Intrinsic Attacks in Resource-Constrained COTS based Traditional and Futuristic Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT).” It is a collaborative grant between QU and Tennessee Tech University in collaboration with the Ministry of Interior, Qatar. The PIs from QU are Dr. Abdelkarim Erradi and Dr. Uvais Qidwai, while the Tennessee Tech University PIs are Dr. Syed Rafay Hasan, Dr. Tarek Elfouly and Dr. Terry Guo. The project revolves around three main objects: (a) The development of hardware intrinsic security mechanisms for Resource Constrained (RC) Commercial off the shelf (COTS) based traditional IoT systems, (b) Investigating the vulnerability of hardware intrinsic security mechanisms for RC-COTS based futuristic AIoT system, and (c) developing a testbed implementation to examine real world scenarios to make the proposed work technology ready.
Dr. Tamer Elsayed
The project led by Dr. Tamer Elsayed is titled “Dimension-Specific Automated Scoring of Arabic Language Writing Proficiency“. The project’s team is entirely based in Qatar, having Dr. Houda Bouamor from CMU-Q and Dr. Walid Massoud from QU, with complementary expertise in Arabic natural language processing, information retrieval, applied machine learning, and psychometrics and standardized testing. The goal of the project is to build an automated scoring system for the quality of students’ writing abilities (on different aspects) in standard Arabic exams (similar to IELTS or TOEFL English exams). The proposed system, which is potentially the first of its kind in the Arab region, will potentially help in assessing the students’ writing proficiency in Arabic exams offered at QU as well as several high schools at Qatar Foundation. The project is funded for 3 years.
Prof. Abdelaziz Bouras as speaker in the The Smart City Expo Doha 2022
Prof. Abdelaziz Bouras participated as speaker in the The Smart City Expo Doha 2022, organized by TASMU and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in Msheireb, Doha, on 29th and 30th of March. He was one of the speakers of the panel titled “Unleashing the potential of disruptive technologies in urban management”. The panel addressed how different enabling technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing or Internet of Things, will depict the transformation of urban management in the coming years and decades. These trends point out potential gains in terms of robustness, security, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of public infrastructures running in cities and services delivered to urban dwellers. Unleashing this potential is not only a matter of technological availability and readiness, but also a mix of factors related to project financing and management, public procurement procedures, public-private collaborations, and partnerships, etc. The panel also explored the landscape of hurdles and barriers, and how to overcome them to turn promises of disruption into reality.
A team from QU, called Oryx, came second runner up in the local Microsoft Imagine Cup 2022. Imagine Cup brings together, every year, student innovators using passion and purpose to tackle social issues with tech. Each team creates an innovative solution from start to finish, while competing on a global stage for the title of World Champion. The Oryx team includes Raseena Haris, Jayakanth Kunhoth, Bajeela Aejas, and Najmath Ottakath. The team created Qalbee, a mobile system app for the early prediction of heart disorder risk, under the Health category. Using real-time ECG signals with the help of artificial intelligence algorithms.
The proposed system consists of a smart wearable band and a smartphone application. The smart wearable band is equipped with an ECG sensor and Bluetooth sensor. The embedded ECG sensor continuously records the impulses of the heart and transfers them to the smartphone application via Bluetooth. The smart application communicates with the AI decision-making model deployed in the cloud to predict the abnormality from the processed ECG signal. Upon detecting an anomalous heart rate, the user can be alerted along with authorities for further analysis or immediate action saving a life. The AI model is developed using a latest machine learning algorithm trained on the ECG dataset acquired from the public domain.
Congratulations for the team members!
The Oryx Team Receiving the 2022 Microsoft Imagine Cup Qatar Competition
In a recent study conducted by researchers at Stanford University, three faculty members from our department were featured in the list of the top 2% of the world’s most-cited scientists during 2020, in addition to the list of the top 2% of the most-cited scientists during their full academic journey. Dr. Cagatay Catal, Prof. Sumaya Al-Maadeed, and Dr. Elias Yaacubhave made it to the first list. Furthermore, Dr. Cagatay and Dr. Elias were featured in the second one.
The number of scientists from Qatar University increased by nearly 20% in the first list and by nearly 30% in the second list compared to last year. The lists included more than 100,000 researchers around the world according to Scopus database till August 1, 2021.
The inclusion of Qatar University faculty members in the list, for the second year respectively, is a clear acknowledgment of Qatar University’s success endeavor in preparing highly skilled cadres, producing high-quality research, and leading in research and education.
Qatar University Top Scholars- Selected Single Calendar Year 2020 Citation Impact Results.
Qatar University Top Scholars- Selected Career-Long Citation Impact Results
