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“Being a Muslim is the great grace from Allah”!

Welcome to my website!

I’m a professor of Computer Science at Computer Science and Engineering Department at Qatar University. I enjoy being in the lecture hall with my students and in the research lab with my research group (bigIR). My main research areas are Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing, and Big Data Analytics, hence comes the name bigIR! I work more on building systems that benefit our community and region, e.g., Arabic search and NLP systems.

I published several publications in top-tier conferences and journals such as ACM SIGIR, ACL, AAAI, IP&M, JASIST, and VLDB. I was awarded four NPRP research grants from QNRF as the lead-PI for more than 3-million USD. I collaborated with local institutes such as QCRI, CMUQ, and AlJazeera, as well as international institutes such as University of Texas-Austin, University of Edinburgh, and RMIT.

I established and leads an active research group that conducts research at the intersection of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Big Data, with emphasis on Arabic language and social media analytics. Along with my research group, I received three best paper awards, one best reviewer award, and one best doctoral paper award, all at international venues. I was the recipient of the QU CENG Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research in 2023.

With my previous experience at UMD, Google, KAUST, and Microsoft, I strive to help students acquire the best skills needed in their professional career and to build a strong research team that helps support the research capacity in Qatar and the region (إن شاء الله). I believe in the abilities of our students to achieve high quality work if they are well trained and well motivated.

I’m fortunate to be a graduate of Alexandria University, Egypt, and University of Maryland, College Park, USA. I’m also proud to have the opportunity to work at the 2 technology giants: Google and Microsoft, and the promising research university KAUST, in different times in my career, before joining Qatar University.

I received my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Alexandria University in Egypt, and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) in the United States in 2009. My main research interest is in information retrieval with an emphasis on web search, Arabic NLP, and large-scale text analysis. I spent one year as a post-doctoral researcher at the Cloud Computing Center at UMD, where I participated in the design, development, and evaluation of an open-source retrieval engine called Ivory. In summer 2010, I joined the Advanced Systems Lab at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) as a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of Mathematics and Computer Science, where I worked on two research projects: asynchronous iterations support for MapReduce, and real-time search in Twitter. I joined Micorosft Advanced Technology Lab at Cairo in summer 2011 as a researcher before joining Qatar University in Fall 2012 as an assistant professor. I also had a summer internship at Google, Mountain View, CA, United States, in 2007 where I worked as a software engineer intern on a project that suggests auto-replies to customers’ email inquiries. It was my first experience in MapReduce and large-scale processing.

I exist online. You can find my research profiles at Google Scholar, DBLP, ACM, ACL Anthology, QRDI, Academic Tree, and Research Gate. I also exist on social media. You can find me on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter (X).