RESEARCHER - MICROSOFT, CAIRO

Mar. 2007 – Feb. 2011

Conducting productive research in the following projects:

• BookWeb:

  • Exploring digitized content by cross linking topical segments and automatically extracted key phrases to topical segments

  • Automatically identifying table of content pages and linking their entries to appropriate pages

  • Automatic constructing of tables of content by identifying headlines in digitized content

  • Improving search of digitized content by identifying most valuable parts of content

  • Resulting in: ThinkWeek paper; invention disclosure; collaboration with MSRC (Natasa Milic-Frayling's group); joint TechFest 2008 demo with MSRC; papers in INEX and CIKM workshop.

• IBIS:

  • Measuring Bing's (formerly Live) search effectiveness for Arabic

  • Working on improving search effectiveness:

    • Index coverage: supplied a white list of good Arabic URL's for manual boosting of their static rank

    • Word breaking: designed, tested, and helped code a new Arabic word breaker

  • Resulting in: a ThinkWeek paper; a white list that helped quadruple Bing's Arabic index; a word-breaker that was checked-in into Bing's tree

• Transbulletization:

  • Attempting to trim superfluous parts from sentences that are translated from different languages into English using parsing and statistical summarization techniques without breaking the flow of sentences

  • Integrating concept into a cross-language search application

  • Resulting in: TechFest 2009 demo; invention disclosure

• Enterprise documenting linking:

  • Attempting to help users navigate intranets by providing contextual links/recommendations based on a user's:

    • Current context -- searching using salient term in context

    • Browsing history -- utilizing relevance feedback and filtering

  • Providing related resources such as documentations, people pages, etc.

  • Resulting in: a TechFest 2009 demo; tool to become TechFest 2010 official search/browsing tool; incubation with FuturePoint group

• Search results diversification:

  • Attempting to identify a query's different meanings (extrinsic diversity) or different facets (intrinsic diversity) to diversify top search results

  • Using knowledge bases to perform diversification

  • Using density-based clustering to perform diversification

  • Resulting in: paper submitted to ECIR-2010; participation in TREC-2009 relevance feedback track (in collaboration with MSRC's Stephen Robertson's group) with an oral presentation at TREC; collaboration with PAMI group in University of Waterloo (Dr. Mohamed Kamel)

• OCRless retrieval:

  • Language independent searching of document images without performing OCR by clustering similar connected components and rendering queries into images

  • Applying IR techniques such as weighted structured queries to improve retrieval effectiveness

  • Applying density based clustering to improve clustering

  • Resulting in: TechFest 2009 demo; invention disclosure; SPIRE-2009 paper

• Machine translation:

  • Developing Arabic language handling to improve Ar <=> En MT

  • Designing and testing an Arabic word breaker for Ar => En MT to improve lexical coverage

  • Helping design and test Arabic reverse word breaker for En => Ar MT

  • Performing acronym expansion to aid En => any_language MT

  • Detecting named entities as targets for transliteration

  • Transliterating Ar <=> En named entities

  • Resulting in: Tech transfer of Arabic word breaker in MSR MT system; reverse word breaker tech transfer expected in Nov. 2009

• Bing instant answers:

  • Performing cross language search to improve image search for Arabic by overcoming the lack of Arabic meta-information about images

    • Arabic queries translated into English and results are shown to user

  • Translating English instant answers automatically into Arabic

  • Translating English Wikipedia Info-boxes into Arabic to aid in on Arabic question answering based on knowledge bases

Resulting in: 2 ThinkWeek papers; development of instant answers in progress

RESEARCHER - IBM, CAIRO

Mar. 2005 – Mar. 2007

• Performing productive research and development in the following areas:

  • Arabic OCR degraded text retrieval

    • Incorporating character, word, stem, and stem-template based language modeling to improve error correction

    • Adapting blind relevance to OCR degraded documents

    • Investigating/developing techniques for developing relevance judgments without pooling for OCR degraded collections

    • Developing degraded Arabic word clustering to improve search term highlighting

  • Machine/Human Assisted Human/Machine translation

    • Using the output of a machine translation system to build localized language models to improve type-ahead for translators

    • Incorporating speech recognition technology with existing machine translation technology to speed-up human translation

  • Information extraction from biomedical text

    • Employing unsupervised learning techniques to infer patterns that contain relationships/interactions between biomedical named entities

    • Applying inferred models in extracting protein-protein interaction

  • Adaptive cross-language text filtering

• Team leader, InfoMind Project

  • Integrating MT, IE, IR, adaptive filtering, and information visualization

  • Managing research engineers in varying parts of the projects

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR - CAIRO UNIVERSITY, CAIRO

Aug. 2005 – Aug. 2016

Information Systems Department, Faculty of Computer Science and Informatics

· Designing and teaching of Courses

o Data structures

o Unstructured document retrieval

• Managing teaching assistants

• Supervising research assistants in

  • Rapid development of IR test collection

  • Arabic-Hebrew cross language retrieval

  • Employing Arabic morphological analysis in word clustering and highlighting of search results

  • Interactive query expansion

  • Automatic web page structural analysis

  • Wikipedia named entity tagging

• Supervising senior graduation projects: natural language question authoring; multi-lingual desktop search; affect resolution; browser history caching and search; Arabic named entity recognition

Egyptian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology Research Center of Excellent (co-PI)

• Developing a web portal for aggregating Arabic web news (www.alzoa.com)

  • Deploying state-of-the-art Arabic text search

  • Using automatic document clustering

  • Investigating automatic Arabic phrase extraction for summarization purposes

  • Investigating ways to anonymously customize web pages to suite specific users

  • Exploring ways to make news interactive and solicit user input

LECTURER - GERMAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

Jan. 2004 - Aug. 2005

Department of Information Engineering and Technology

• Designing and teaching introductory Electrical Engineering Courses

  • Basic Circuit Theory

  • Electric Circuits Lab

  • Digital Logic Design

• Managing teaching and research assistants

• Performing research in Arabic information retrieval

  • Comparing different word stemming and clustering techniques for Arabic information retrieval

  • Devising new methods for rapid construction of test collections for monolingual and cross-lingual retrieval

• Performing research in Bioinformatics

  • Evaluating the effectiveness of controlled vocabularies in information retrieval

  • Designing automatic methods for assigning controlled vocabulary entries to documents

  • Participating in the 2004 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Genomics Track (Ranked 3rd in the Adhoc Retrieval task and 6th in the Triage task)

• Collaborating with the Library of Alexandria in the Million Book Project

  • Introduction and evaluation of information retrieval technology to scanned and OCR’ed Arabic books

  • Exploration and evaluation of error tolerant Arabic word clustering and morphology techniques

SENIOR CONSULTANT - KEVRIC, SILVER SPRING, MD

Jun. 2003 – Feb. 2004

Knowledge Management project – under contract from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

• Served as Principal Investigator (PI) on the project to evaluate emerging knowledge management technologies intended to facilitate NIH’s grant review process

• Identifying the needs of scientific review administrators tasked with routing incoming grant proposals to appropriate reviewers

• Researching existing technologies and developing alternative ones to address the stated needs

• Establishing criteria for evaluating potentially viable technologies

• Evaluating the usability and effectiveness of the different technologies

The BISC project – under contract from NIH

• Served as a research scientist to facilitate the adoption and integration of varying biomedical ontologies intended to support clinical research applications

• Migrating different biomedical ontologies in varying formats (such DAML and OWL) to standardized formats to facilitate their integration

• Designing applications that rely on the ontologies and defining insertion points for integrating the ontologies into the applications

• Working on interfacing applications and the ontologies using API’s