Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings Volume 2018 Issue 3

One of the main suppliers of the workforce for the engineering industry and the economy in general is the higher education sector. The higher education sector is consistently being challenged by the fast evolving industry and hence it is under constant pressure to fulfill the industry's ever-changing needs. It needs to adapt its academic curricula to supply the industry with students who have update-to-date and relevant co Read More

Many statistics show the number of connected devices (Internet of Things; IoT) worldwide to grow drastically in the next few years, to exceed 30 billion just by 2020. All these devices need to be connected to the internet, to establish tow ways communication with the backend applications. The list of applications and services that can be enabled by using IoT can be endless, covering different areas such as smart cities, smart ho Read More

Extended AbstractPeople increasingly use social media such as Facebook and Twitter during disasters and emergencies. Research studies have demonstrated the usefulness of social media information for a number of humanitarian relief operations ranging from situational awareness to actionable information extraction. Moreover, the use of social media platforms during sudden-onset disasters could potentially bridge th Read More

According to Energy Technology Perspectives 2014, there are approximately 900 million light duty vehicles (not counting two- and three-wheelers) today, and that number will be doubled by 2050 to reach 2 billion. Such a considerable increase will bring-in further challenges for road safety and traffic efficiency. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children and young adults in the United States, with an annual Read More

Twitter has been developed as an immense information creation and sharing network through which users post information. Information could vary from the world»s breaking news to other topics such as sports, science, religion, and even personal daily updates. Although a user would regularly check her Twitter timeline to stay up-to-date on her topics of interest, it is impossible to cope with manual tracking of those topics while t Read More

Complex adaptive systems exhibit emergent behavior. This type of behavior occurs in volatile environments involving cyber-physical systems, such as those aimed at smart cities operations. Adaptive systems’ maintenance aims at improving their performance by dealing with the treatment of continuous and frequently changing requirements. Adaptive systems’ behavior requires therefore up-to-date requirements traceability. Read More

Technology always seeks to improve the little details in our lives for a faster and a more efficient life-pace. One of these little problems we face in our daily lives is finding relevant events. For example you visit a place like Katara with your kids and you spend your time in vain looking for a fun event, and after you leave the venue a friend of yours tells you about this interesting “Henna and face painting workshop organized in b Read More

Tremendous interest in visualizing massive datasets has promoted tiled-display wall systems that offer an immersive and collaborative environment with an extremely high-resolution. To achieve an efficient visualization, the rendering process should be parallelized and distributed among multiple nodes. The Data Observatory at Imperial College London has a unique setup consisting of 64 screens powered by 32 machines providing Read More

Structural health Monitoring (SHM) is a very critical component for sustainable civil and mechanical structures in modern urban settings. The sky-scrappers and huge bridges in modern metropolis today are essential aspects of the prosperity and development of a country but at the same time they present a great challenge in terms of maintaining and sustaining the structures in a good health. Due to the complex designs of the Read More

Obesity is one of the major health risk factors behind the rise of non-communicable conditions. Understanding the factors influencing obesity is very complex since there are many variables that can affect the health behaviors leading to it. Nowadays, multiple data sources can be used to study health behaviors, such as wearable sensors for physical activity and sleep, social media, mobile and health data. In this paper we Read More

The Internet has become part of almost every organizational culture where security threats increase with the increase use of the Internet. Therefore, security practice has become increasingly important for almost every organization where is the same case of the Qatar Meteorology Department (QMD) in the state of Qatar. The aim of this research is to evaluate the current security level of the QMD by examining the Read More

We live in the digital age where most of our activities and services are carried out over the internet. Items such as music, movies, products etc. are being consumed over the web by millions of users. The number of such items is large enough that it is impossible for a user to experience everything. This is where recommender systems come into play. Recommender systems are employed to play a crucial role of filtering Read More

Mental stress occurs when a person perceives abnormal demands or pressures that influence the sense of well-being. These high demands sometimes exceed human capabilities to cope with. Stressors such as workload, inflexible working hours, financial problem, or handling more than one task can cause work-related stress which in turn leads to less productive employees. Lost productivity costs global economy approxi Read More

In this research work, we propose a framework of experiential learning to enhance student work skills and experience. This research main to contribute to the development and expansion of local industry, through the conduct of long-term fundamental research that contributes to the science base and understanding needs of national economy through industrial by providing an adapted method, enhance the teaching c Read More

Wikipedia is the most influential popular information source on the Internet, and is ranked as the fifth most visited website [1] (Alexa, 2017). The English-language Wikipedia is a prominent source of online health information compared to other providers such as MedlinePlus and NHS Direct (Laurent and Vickers, 2009). Wikipedia has challenged the way that traditional medical encyclopaedia knowledge is built by creating an Read More

As urban data keeps getting bigger, deep learning is coming to play a key role in providing big data predictive analytics solutions. We are interested in developing a new generation of deep learning based computational technologies that predict traffic congestion and crowd management. In this work, we are mainly interested in efficiently predicting future traffic with high accuracy. The proposed deep learning solution allows the r Read More

Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) enables parties to compute a pub- lic function over private inputs. A classical example is the millionaires problem, where two millionaires want to figure out who is wealthier without revealing their actual wealth to each other. The insight gained from the secure computa- tion is nothing more than what is revealed by the output (in this case, who was wealthier but not the actual value of th Read More

One of the most prominent areas of energy consumption in residential units is for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. The conventional systems for HVAC depend on the wired thermostats that are deployed at fixed locations and hence, are not convenient and do not respond to the dynamic nature of the thermal envelope of the buildings. Moreover, it is important to note that the distribution of the spa Read More

E-learning is the use of Internet technologies or computer-assisted instruction, to enhance and improve knowledge and performance, because knowledge is the basic right for a human right that should be accessible by everyone regardless of the status of they disabilities. E-learning technologies offer learners control over content, learning sequence, pace of learning, time, and often media, allowing them to tailor thei Read More

I. Background In power grid, circuit breakers in switchgears are often the last line of defense when big systems must be protected from faults [1], sudden switchgear failures could cause long outages, huge economic losses and even present threats to the public safety. Based on field experience, the major causes of switchgear failure are loose or corroded metal connections, degraded cable insulation and external ag Read More

Online Social Networks (OSNs), such as Facebook and Twitter, are popular platforms that enable users to interact and socialize through their networked devices. However, the social nature of such applications forces users to share a great amount of personal data with other users and the OSN service providers, including pictures, location check-ins, etc. Even though some OSNs offer configurable privacy controls that limit a Read More

Mega data centers (DCs) are considered as efficient and promising infrastructures for supporting numerous cloud computing services such as online office, online social networking, Web search and IT infrastructure out-sourcing. The scalability of these services is influenced by the performance and dependability characteristics of the DCs. Consequently, the DC networks are constructed with a large number of netw Read More

This paper examines the impact on patient experience through the creation of a bespoke patient queuing and communication application using in-house developed technologies. Sidra Medicine hospital's outpatient pharmacy was experiencing mismanaged queue lines, dissatisfied patients, and the lack of data necessary to determine the length of time elapsing in obtaining medication. After analyzing patient surveys through the Read More

In this paper, we propose a novel method for the detection of road accidents by analyzing audio streams for road surveillance application. In the last decade, due to the increase in a number of people and transportation vehicles, traffic accidents have become one of a major public issue worldwide. The vast number of injuries and death due to road traffic accident reveals the story of a global crisis of road safety. A total of Read More

We present MATQAM (Multilingual Answer Triggering Question Answering Machine) a multilingual answer triggering open-domain QA system, focusing on answering questions whose answers might be in free texts in multiple languages within Wikipedia.Obtaining relevant information from the Web has become more challenging, since online communities and social media tend to confine people to bounded trends and ways Read More