Qatar Computing Research Institute
Discovery to Delivery
Dr. Sofiane Abbar
Senior Software Engineer
Social Computing
+(974) 4454 1736
I was amazed by the QCRI vision and its ambition to be one of the best research labs in the world. That's why I wanted to be a part of this project.
Research Focus at QCRI
Sofiane's research focuses on developing new algorithms and tools for a better understood of users’ engagement and sentiment in the social web of news. He is also interested on leveraging user generated data, e.g., tweets, comments, shares and visits to identify the most trending topics. This data can be also used to make diversity-aware recommendation for users.
A list of Sofiane's ongoing projects follows:
- MAQSA: Topic centric dashboard for sentiment analysis (QCRI, MIT, and Aljazeera)
- DivNews: Sentiment-based and Diversity-aware news recommendation (QCRI, MIT)
- Ranking item features (QCRI)
- Mining Frequent Itemsets in uncertain data (QCRI)
- NegPos-RS: Integrating Negative preferences into recommender systems (QCRI, University of Essenia)
Previous Experience
Before joining QCRI, Sofiane was a PhD candidate at Versailles University. There, he had been involved in two CNRS projects (APMD and AOC), and one industrial project (UUPP) with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs. His contributions to these projects focused on data personalization, user modeling, context-awareness, and recommendation systems.
Professional Experience
- University of Paris Dauphine (France), Temporary assistant professor, 2010-2011
- University of Versailles (France), Lecturer, 2008-2010
- Alcatel-Lucent Bell-Labs (France), research internship, 2007-2008
Professional Associations and Awards
Education
- PhD, University of Versailles (France), 2010
- M.Sc, University of Paris Dauphine (France), 2007
- Engineering Bachelor, Ecole Superieur d’Informatique (Algeria),2006
Selected Research
Book Chapter
- S. Abbar, M. Bouzeghoub, S. Lopes, Personalization Paradigm in Service Delivery Platforms. In Handbook on “Service Delivery Platforms: Developing and Deploying Converged Multimedia Services”. Edited by Syed A. Ahson and Mohammad Ilyas, CRC Press. ISBN: 978-1-4398008-9-8. 650 pages, February 2011.
Conferences
- Sofiane Abbar, Sihem Amer-Yahia, Piotr Indyk, and Sepideh Mahabadi: Real-Time Recommendation of Diverse Related Articles. To appear in Proceedings of the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2013).
- Sofiane Abbar, Sihem Amer-Yahia, Piotr Indyk, Sepideh Mahabadi, and Kasturi Varadarajan: Diverse Near Neighbor Problem. To appear in Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium of Computational Geometry (SoCG2013).
- Sihem Amer-Yahia, Samreen Anjum, Amira Ghenai, Aysha Siddique, Sofiane Abbar, Samuel Madden, Adam Marcus, and Mohammed El-Haddad: MAQSA: A System for Social Analytics on News. In proceeding of SIGMOD 2012.
- S. Abbar, M. Bouzeghoub, S. Lopes, Introducing Contexts into Personalized Web Applications. In Proceedings of 12th international Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (IIWAS'10). November 2010. Paris, France.
Connect with me
In the News
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.
The Role of Technology in Crisis Management and How it Could Be Done Better
08/05/2013
QCRI's Patrick Meier discusses technology and crisis management with Chicago Policy Review.
Can 'Verily' build a smarter social media for disasters?
08/05/2013
QCRI's Patrick Meier talks with Foreign Policy Magazine about sharing information during a crisis, and verifying that information for aid.
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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