Qatar Computing Research Institute
Discovery to Delivery
QCRI Management
Dr Ahmed K Elmagarmid
Ahmed K Elmagarmid is the inaugural Executive Director of Qatar Computing Research Institute at Qatar Foundation. Before joining Qatar Foundation in 2010, he was founder and director of both the Cyber Center in Discovery Park and the Indiana Center for Database Systems at Purdue University. He was a full professor of computer science at Purdue, where he had been actively involved in teaching and research for 22 years. Early in his career he received the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator award from President Ronald Reagan. The University of Dayton and Ohio State University have both named him among their distinguished alumni. He is an IEEE fellow and an ACM distinguished scientist and is a member of Sigma Xi American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr Elmagarmid has chaired and served on several program committees and editorial boards. His expertise spans foundational and application-oriented database research.
Dr Elmagarmid served as a chief scientist in HP’s Office of Strategy and Technology. He has worked with and consulted for Telcordia Technology, Bellcore, IBM, CSC, Harris, D. H. Brown and Associates, MCC, Bell Northern Research, Molecular Design Labs, SOGEI (Italy), Sidra Medical and Research Center, and UniSql among others. Dr Elmagarmid is an accomplished and well-published scientist, authoring six books and more than 180 papers, and has several active grants from state and federal government agencies and the industry.
Dr Elmagarmid received his BS in computer science from the University of Dayton and his MS and PhD from Ohio State University. He has held faculty positions at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Padova, and Purdue University.
Dr Abdellatif Saoudi
Abdellatif Saoudi is the Managing Director of Qatar Computing Research Institute at Qatar Foundation. Prior to joining Qatar Foundation, Dr Saoudi served as Head Corporate Solutions in Qatar Petroleum where he managed a large-scale ICT projects portfolio as well as leading major initiatives related to web technologies, enterprise content Management (ECM) and GIS.
He also has worked as an IT expert for the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he played a key role in leading the strategic banking solutions.
Dr Saoudi served on the faculties of the Polytechnic Institute of Nantes and Nantes University. The author of several industrial and scientific papers, his research interests lie in internet computing, data analytics, and knowledge management.
In 2008, he received the GIS Special Achievement Award from (Environmental Systems Research Institute) (ESRI )in San Diego (California).
Dr Saoudi received his PhD in Computer Science from Nantes University (France) in 1997 and his MSc from INSA de Lyon (France).
In the News
QCRI scientists recognized with best paper at ISCRAM 2013
22/05/2013
Extracting Information Nuggets from Disaster Related Messages in Social Media authored by QCRI's Muhammad Imran, Carlos Castillo, Patrick Meier, former QCRI post-doc Shady Elbassuoni and Fernando Diaz of Microsoft Research was recognized as the best paper at this year's ISCRAM conference.
Crisis Maps: Harnessing the Power of Big Data to Deliver Humanitarian Assistance
19/05/2013
Dr. Patrick Meier talks about QCRI's work to solve major humanitarian challenges in Forbes.
Research proposal receives QNRF NPRP award
15/05/2013
Dr. Halima Bensmail, QCRI Scientific Computing, is a key investigator on a research proposal awarded by QNRF's sixth NPRP cycle for the proposal titled: Quantitative mapping of HIV incidence among stable couples and evaluation of impact of interventions targeting sero-discordant couples.
Upcoming Events
2013
29/05/2013,
Rhodes Island, Greece
Dr. Halima Bensmail, Senior Scientist of QCRI's Scientific Computing team, is an Invited speaker at the PETRAE, giving a talk on “Time course and Neural Representation of Memorability: faces and places: an alpha-sparse model for classifying memorability regions”
For more info on PETRAE please visit www.petrae.org
09/06/2013 - 14/06/2013,
Atlanta, Georgia USA
The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Annual Conference takes place in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) from June 9 - 14, 2013.
22/06/2013 - 27/06/2013,
New York, New York, USA
Our Data Analytics team will be at 2013 SIGMOD / PODS in New York. The team will present two papers.
Press Releases
QCRI invites applicants for summer internships
08/05/2013
Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) will be kicking off its 2013 summer internship program soon, and invites computer science and computer engineering students to apply. The intensive two-month internship program provides students with the opportunity to work closely with top researchers, and receive practical work experience based on their studies. Applications will be accepted until May 12, 2013.
Presenting a Vision for the Future of Humanitarian Technology
31/03/2013
Dr Patrick Meier, Director of Social Innovation at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and the world’s foremost expert on humanitarian technology, explores the rise of digital humanitarian response and how new technologies are reshaping the humanitarian space in an upcoming talk.
QCRI and Boeing to collaborate on Data Analytics Research
24/03/2013
Joint project will seek to identify patterns in large data streams
Research collaboration broadens Boeing engagement in Qatar, strengthens relationship with Qatar Foundation
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