Received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research from College of Engineering, Qatar University.

Dimension-Specific Automated Scoring of Arabic Language Writing Proficiency

Funded by: Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF)
Project no.: NPRP14S-0402-210127
Role: Lead PI
Title: Dimension-Specific Automated Scoring of Arabic Language Writing Proficiency
Collaborators: Dr. Houda Bouamor (CMUQ) Dr. Walid Massoud (Qatar University)
Start Date: 30 Mar 2023
End Date: 30 Mar 2026

Got the ``Best Reviewer Award at CIKM 2021.

My senior students, whom I supervised for their graduation project, has achieved the second place among the best CS Senior Project for the academic year 2020-2021, with the project titled “Check it Before You Spread it! Hadith Verification over Twitter”. Proud of the work of the student Aisha Al-Mirza, Fatima Al Majid, and Maryam Al-Jabir, and the goal of the project too. Congratulations !!!

Three of my PhD students, Fatima Haouari, Maram Hasanain, and Reem Suwaileh, have won the “Best Paper Award” on their paper titled “ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection” at the 6th Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (WANLP 2021). WANLP is the premier venue for Arabic NLP and it was sponsored this year by Google.

My PhD student Marwa Essam got the “Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award” for her PhD proposal titled ``News Background Linking`` at ECIR 2021 conference, one of the top IR conferences.

Our QU team (Marwa Essam and me) got ranked 2nd at TREC 2019 in News (among 9 international teams).

My prospective PhD student Fatima Haouari has been awarded GSRA research grant funding from QNRF for her PhD study at Qatar University.

My student Sara Al-Rasbi has successfully defended her MSc thesis titled ``SparkIR: A Scalable Distributed Information Retrieval Engine over Spark`` and got her degree *with Distinction* (with consensus of all members of the examination committee) for the third time within my group. This happens rarely in the College of Engineering at Qatar University!
Examination committee included Prof. Omar Bossaid (Université Lumière Lyon 2) and Dr. Aiman Erbad (QU).

Early Detection of Fake News over Arabic Social Media

Funded by: Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF)
Project no.: NPRP11S-1204-170060
Role: Lead PI
Title: Early Detection of Fake News over Arabic Social Media
Collaborators: Dr. Walid Magdy (University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Abdulaziz Alali (Qatar University)
Start Date: June 2019
End Date: December 2022

I have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of Computer science at our CSE department in Aug 2018.

I wouldn’t have achieved this without the help and contribution of every single one of my research group! Without their effort, dedication, understanding, and even dreaming and do’aa, *we* wouldn’t achieve it. And I really mean *we* as I believe the group deserve it as much as I do. The journey wasn’t just mine – I’m deeply grateful to every one of them!

Thanks are also due to all of my (former and current) students, research assistants, and collaborators. This promotion is attributed to a long list of them.

My prospective PhD student Reem Suwaileh has been awarded GSRA research grant funding from QNRF for her PhD study at Qatar University.
Great achievement — Congratulations Reem!

My student Reem Suwaileh has successfully defended her MSc thesis titled ``On the Relevance Filtering for Real-time Summarization`` and got her degree *with Distinction* (with consensus of all members of the examination committee) for the second time within my group. This happens rarely in the College of Engineering at Qatar University!
Examination committee included Prof. Ali Jaoua (QU), Dr. Abdelkarim Erradi(QU), and Prof. Fazly Can (Bilkent University).

Received the Excellence in Services award from Computer Science and Engineering Dept. at Qatar University for the academic year 2017/2018.

Our bigIR (representing QU) team has been ranked first at TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) 2016 international research competition in the “Real-time Summarization” track (mobile notification task) among 19 research teams (who have participated with automatic systems) from all over the world (see a list of teams below). This is the first time in the history of this prestigious conference (which is celebrating the 25th anniversary this year) for an Arab Muslim team to be ranked first in any of the tracks. Among the participating teams are 2 teams from University of Waterloo (Canada) and 2 teams from University of Maryland (US).

QU team includes Reem Suwaileh (MSc student) and Maram Hasanain (PhD student), besides me.

The same QU team has been also ranked 2nd among 15 research teams at another task (Email Digest) within the same track! Moreover, another QU team (including Rana Malhas (PhD student), Marwan Torki (PostDoc), and Rahma Ali (MSc student), besides me) has been ranked 4th among 16 research teams at the “Live Question Answering” track. Both were also impressive rankings.

Participating teams (Real-time Summarization, Push Notification Scenario):

• University of Waterloo (Clarke group), Canada
• University of Waterloo (Lin group), Canada
• Beijing University of Technology, China
• NLP Lab, Central China Normal U., China
• IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse), France
• CLIP Lab, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
• The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, India
• Heilongjiang Institute of Technology, China
• Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication, India
• Indian Statistical Institute (Kolkata), India
• Social Network Analysis Lab, School of Computer, NUDT (National University of Defense Technology), China
• Peking University, China
• Philips Research North America, USA
• Qatar University, Qatar
• Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia
• University of Delaware (Carterette group), USA
• InfoLab @ University of Delaware, USA
• Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Got best paper award at ِThe 4th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2016) for the paper titled “Why Is That Relevant? Collecting Annotator Rationales for Relevance Judgments” co-authored with Tyler Mcdonnell UUT-Austin), Matt Lease (UT-Austin), and Mucahid Kutlu (QU).

Got best paper award at ِAsia Information Retrieval Societies Conference (AIRS) 2015 for the paper titled ``Improving Tweet Timeline Generation by Predicting Optimal Retrieval Depth`` co-authored with my prospective PhD student Maram Hasanain and Walid Magdy (QCRI).

Our QU team (Reem Suwaileh, Maram Hasanain, and me) got ranked 2nd at TREC 2015, Microblog track, realtime filtering task, push notification scenario among 14 participating international teams!! This is really a BIG achievement for our research group (الحمد لله) and I'm really proud of my students!!

Participating teams:
- Dalhousie University
- East China Normal University (ECNU)
- Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI-CNR)
- Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT)
- Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII)
- Social Network Analysis Lab, School of Computer, NUDT (NUDTSNA)
- Peking University
- Philips Research North America (PRNA)
- Qatar University
- University of Delaware
- University of Maryland - Human-Computer Interaction Lab
- University of Maryland - CLIP Lab
- University of Waterloo - MDS
- University of Waterloo - Clarke

In Fall 2015, I was honored to teach the first-ever “Big Data Analytics” course in Qatar (and probably the region!) as a PhD course in CS at Qatar University (which was also the first-ever course that was solely dedicated to PhD students at QU).

My senior students Abdelrazek Ibrahim, Karim Fahmi, and Ahemd Abdelhamid team won the ``best CSE senior project award`` of academic year 2014/2015 with their senior (graduation) project titled ``Smart Shopping Cart`` that I supervised!

My student Maram Hasanain has successfully defended her MSc thesis titled ``Query Performance Prediction for Microblog Search`` and got her degree *with Distinction* (with consensus of all membes of the examination committee) in the first time in the history of College of Engineering at Qatar University!
Examination committee included Prof. Ali Jaoua (QU), Dr. Abdelkarim Erradi(QU), and Prof. Franciska de Jong (University of Twente).

Efficient and Scalable Evaluation for Searching Massive Arabic Social Media and Web Collections [as Lead-PI]

Funded by: Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF)
Project no.: NPRP 7 – 1313 – 1 – 245
Role: Lead-PI
Awarded Amount: $883,846.90
Collaborator: Dr. Matt Lease (University of Texas-Austin)
Start Date: 01-Apr-2015
End Date: 05-Jul-2018

Scalable Analytics Engine for Big Graphs on the Cloud [as PI]

Funded by: Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF)
Project no.: NPRP 7 – 1330 – 2 – 483
Role: PI
Title: Scalable Analytics Engine for Big Graphs on the Cloud
Collaborator: Dr. Mohammad Hammoud (CMU, Qatar)
Start Date: 01-Dec-2015
End Date: 01-Dec-2018

Answering Real-time Questions from Arabic Microblogs [as Lead-PI]

Funded by: Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF)
Project no.: NPRP 6 – 1377 – 1 – 257
Role: Lead-PI
Awarded Amount: $1,045,432.80
Collaborators: Prof. Doug Oard (UMD, US), Mark Sanderson (RMIT, Australia)
Start Date: 10-Feb-2014
End Date: 10-Feb-2017