Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings Volume 2014 Issue 1

In 2013, it was estimated that over 382 million people throughout the world suffered from diabetes. Despite the numerous treatment approaches to manage this condition, diabetic patients continue to suffer from various symptoms and complications. These include, but are not limited to, retinopathy, nephropathy, peripheral and autonomic neuropathy, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, cardiovascular, and cerebral symptom Read More

Any global enterprise, such as, Qatar National Bank, with branches in many countries is an example of an Application Service Provider (ASP) that uses multiple cloud data centers to serve their customers. Depending upon the time of the day, the number of users at different location changes and the ASPs need to rescale their operation at each data center to meet the demand at that location. ASPs are facing a great challeng Read More

The project entitled Problem-based Learning Authoring and Transformation Environment (PLATE) is housed at Qatar University. It is under the auspices of the Qatar National Priority Research Program (NPRP). The PLATE project seeks to improve student learning using innovative approaches to problem-based learning (PBL) in a cost-effective, flexible, interoperable, and reusable manner. Traditional subject-based learning that Read More

Electricity consumption has increased substantially over the last decade. According to the Gulf Research Center (2013), residential sector represents the largest portion (about 50%) of electricity consumption in the GCC region, due to substantial growth of electrical residential appliances. Therefore, we present a novel online smart residential load management system that is used to monitor and control power Read More

The emergence of V2X (Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) networks lends a significant support for the Intelligent Transportation Systems to improve many applications for different purposes such as safety, traffic efficiency and added-value services. Typically, such environment is distinguished by its mobility and topology dynamics over space and time. Moreover, these applications need to collect an Read More

To gather and transmit data, low cost wireless devices are often deployed in open, unattended and possibly hostile environment making them particularly vulnerable to physical attacks. Resilience is needed to mitigate such inherent vulnerabilities and risks related to security and reliability. In this work, Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is studied in presence of packet dropping malicious compromised Read More

"The Data Analytics group at QCRI has embarked on an ambitious endeavor to become a premiere world-class research group in Data Science by tackling diverse research topics related to information extraction, data quality, data profiling, data integration, and data mining. We will present our ongoing projects to overcome different challenges encountered in Big Data Curation, Big Data Fusion, and Big Data Analytics. (1) Big Dat Read More

إن من المؤشرات العلمية التي خرجت بها بعض الدراسات حول أسباب ضعف الانتاج الفكري العربي وضعف المحتوى الرقمي في قواعد البيانات العالمية هو غياب البرامج المحوسبة التي تعنى بتحليل المراجع والاستشهادات المرجعية (العربية) الورادة في هذا الانتاج، وانعدام البرامج الآلية التي تقدم مؤشرات احصائية (ببليومترية) تبرز التوجه البحثي العربي، وتعين صناع القرار في المؤسسات البحثية والأكاديمية والباحثين أيضا في توجيه مسار البحث العلمي العربي ومعرفة نقاط القوة والضعف في التخصصات العربية المبحوث فيها، Read More

The increased use of remote laboratories for online education has made network security issues ever more critical. To defend against numerous new types of potential attacks, the complexity of network firewalls has been significantly increased. Consequently, the network firewall will inevitably limit the real time remote experimental data transmission. To solve the issue of traversing network firewalls, we designed and Read More

This paper proposes design of sensorless induction motor drive based on direct power control (DPC) technique. Principle of DPC technique is presented and possibilities of direct power control (DPC) for induction motors (IMs) fed by a space vector pulse-width modulation inverter (SV-PWM) are studied. The simulation results show that the DPC technique enjoys all advantages of pervious method such as fast dynamic and eas Read More

The complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) and bipolar-complementary metal oxide semiconductor (BiCMOS) technologies offer low power dissipation, good noise performance, high packing density, et cetera in analog and digital circuit design. They have contributed significantly to the advancement of wireless communication and sensing systems and are presently inevitable devices in these systems. As the techn Read More

"ElectroEncephaloGram "EEG" Mental Task Discrimination", Master of Science dissertation, Cairo University, 2010. Recent advances in computer hardware and signal processing have made possible the use of EEG signals or "brain waves" for communication between humans and computers. Locked-in patients have now a way to communicate with the outside world, but even with the last modern techniques, such systems still Read More

Energy efficient wireless communication networks become essential due to the associated environmental and financial benefits. Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising candidate to reach energy efficient communications. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) have been introduced as energy efficient light sources and their light signal intensity can be modulated to transfer data wirelessly. As a result, VLC using LEDs can Read More

Optimal control of thermostatically controlled loads such as air conditioning and hot water storage plays a pivotal role in the development of demand response. Demand response being an enabling technology in a society with an increased electrification and growing production from intrinsically stochastic renewable energy. Optimal control however, often relies on the availability of a system model in combination with Read More

There is no smart grid without a smart end-user! Smart grids will be essential in future energy systems to allow for major improvements in energy efficiency and for the integration of solar energy and other renewables into the grid, thereby contributing to climate change mitigation and environmental sustainability at large. End-users will play a crucial role in these smart grids that aim to link end-users and energy provide Read More

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have unleashed researchers and developers to propose a series of smart systems that serve the needs of societies and enhance the quality of services. WSNs consist of a set of sensors that sense the environmental variables, such as temperature, humidity, speed of objects, and report them back to a central node. Although such architecture seems simple, it is lack of many limitatio Read More

Children with hearing impairments (HI) often face many educational, communicational and societal challenges. Arabic Natural Language Processing can be used to develop several key technologies that may alleviate cognitive and language learning difficulties children with HI face in the Arab world. In this study, we propose a system design that provides the following component functionalities: (1) Multimedia translation eleme Read More

On the Use of Pre-Equalization to Enhance the Passive UHF RFID Communication under Multipath Channel Fading Dr. Taoufik Ben-Jabeur & Dr. Abdullah Kadri Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (QMIC), Qatar Science and Technology Park, Doha, Qatar taoufikb,abdullahk@qmic.com Background: We consider a monostatic passive UHF RFID system where it is composed from one RFID reader with one antenna, for tran Read More

A seven level five-phase voltage source inverter with packed U-cell topology is presented in this paper. This is called Packed U-cell because each unit of the inverter is of shape U. Fig. 1 presents a five-phase seven-level inverter power circuit configuration using Packed U-cell. Depending upon the number of capacitors in the investigated topology different level of voltages can be achieved. In the presented topology two capacit Read More

Energy Storage Systems (ESS) are expected to play a critical role in future energy grids. ESS technologies are primarily employed for reducing the stress on grid and the use of hydrocarbons for electricity generation. However, in order for ESS option to become economically viable, proper sizing is highly desired to recover the high capital cost. In this paper we propose a system architecture that enables us to optimally size the ES Read More

This paper presents an investigation of practical quantum secure communication using multi-photon tolerant protocols. Multi-photon tolerant protocols loosen the limit on the number of photons imposed by currently used quantum key distribution protocols. The multi-photon tolerant protocols investigated in this paper are multi-stage protocols that do not require any prior agreement between a sender Alice and a rec Read More

Background & Objectives: There are 98,000 deaths in the US annually due to errors in the delivery of healthcare causing inpatient mortality and morbidity. Among these errors, ineffective team interaction in the operating room (OR) accounts for one of the main causes. Recently, it has been suggested that developing a conceptual model of verbal and non-verbal exchanges in the OR could lead to a better understanding of th Read More

Qatar has a high potential to develop renewable energy generating systems spatially through solar and wind-based technologies. Although, substantial initiatives have been undertaken in Qatar to reduce the high per capita emissions of the Greenhouse Gases (GHG), solar and wind-based energy generation can also significantly contribute to the mitigation of climate change. The mean Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) of Qat Read More

Email is one of the most widely used forms of written communication over the Internet, and its use has increased tremendously for both personal and professional purposes. The increase in email traffic comes also with an increase in the use of emails for illegitimate purposes to commit all sort of crimes. Phishing, spamming, email bombing, threatening, cyber bullying, racial vilification, child pornography, viruses and malware pr Read More