Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2011 Issue 1

Secondhand exposure to tobacco smoke (SHS) has been proposed to potentially increase risk of acute respiratory infections, middle ear disease, exacerbated asthma and decreased lung function in children.

The objectives of this study of Qatari schoolchildren were six-fold: to assess feasibility of a national study on athletic participation, healthy living and lung function; to provide estimates of height and weight; to estimate the prevalence of exposure to SHS; to assess potential bias of informant; to estimate prevalence of smoking; to compare results of reported exposure to SHS and reported smoking using levels of saliva cotinine (SC).

This pilot phase of the National Epidemiological Study of Lung Health among Qatari Schoolchildren collected data from 321 boys and 413 girls enrolled in government schools in grades 7 to 12 using questionnaires administered by trained native Arabic research staff from October 2008 to April 2009. SC samples, height, weight and spirometry data were collected.

Mean Body Mass Index percentile ranged from 42nd percentile among 19 year old boys to 76th among 17 year olds. Among girls the range was narrower: from 61st percentile in 17 years to 86th in 11 year olds. For male schoolchildren, mothers answered 38% of the questionnaires while fathers answered 62%. For daughters, mothers responded for 58% and fathers for 42%. We found that mothers were more likely to report higher amounts of exposure to SHS than fathers especially for daughters. Fathers reported little exposure to SHS. There were 106 children who showed exposure to nicotine by SC level. Of these, 14 (13%) reported that they were smokers.

Seventy-two percent of children were reported to have been exposed to SHS. This varied by sex of child and reporting parent. The finding on potential reporting bias between mothers and fathers has implications for the future national study. The reported prevalence of smoking among this population was 3%.

Conclusions: (1) Qatari schoolchildren are exposed to SHS; (2) The national study must be designed to control for respondent bias; (3) The national study is feasible.

This study investigated the combined effect of environmental temperature [neutral (22°C/30%rH) vs. warm (35°C/40%rH)] and altitude challenge [sea level (FIO2 0.21) vs. reduced O2 content (FIO2 0.15)] on locomotor performance and the degree of end-exercise neuromuscular fatigue. Eleven physically active subjects cycled to exhaustion at constant workload (66% of their VO2max) in four different environmental conditions [Neutral/Sea level (Control), Warm/Sea level (Hot), Neutral/Reduced O2 content (Hypoxia) and Warm/Reduced O2 content (Hot+Hypoxia)]. The torque and EMG responses following electrical stimulation of the tibial nerve (plantar-flexion; soleus) were recorded before and 5 min after exercise. Time to exhaustion was reduced (P<0.05) in Hot (−35%) or Hypoxia (−36%) compared to Control, while Hot+Hypoxia (−51%) further decreased performance. There was no main effect of temperature or altitude on end-exercise core temperature (P=0.089 and P=0.070, respectively) and rating of perceived exertion (both P>0.05), nor any significant interaction. Reductions in maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) torque (−9%; P<0.001), voluntary activation (−4%; P<0.05) and peak twitch torque (−6%; P<0.05) from pre- to post-exercise were similar between all trials, independently of the environmental temperature or altitude. M-wave amplitude (at rest and during brief MVC) and RMS activity were reduced (P<0.05) in warm compared to neutral conditions, while altitude had no main effect on any measured parameters. Combining environmental temperature and altitude challenges further reduce cycling time to exhaustion but do not exacerbate the degree of end-exercise neuromuscular fatigue.

Introduction: Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is the cellular component of plasma that settles after centrifugation, and contains numerous growth factors. There is increasing interest in the sports medicine about providing endogenous growth factors directly to the injury site, using autologous blood products such as PRP, to potentially facilitate healing and earlier return to. Despite this interest, and apparent widespread use, there is a lack of high-level evidence trials assessing the efficacy of PRP.

Systematic review: We performed a systematic review of the literature and included clinical studies on PRP injections for ligament, muscle or tendon injuries. A few randomized controlled clinical trials have assessed the efficacy of PRP injections and none have demonstrated scientific evidence of efficacy. Scientific studies should be performed to assess clinical indications, efficacy, and safety of PRP, and this will require appropriately powered randomized controlled trials with adequate and validated clinical and functional outcome measures and sound statistical analysis.

Original research: Our group recently studied the effects of a platelet-rich plasma injection in patients with chronic midportion Achilles tendinopathy at 1-year follow-up in a randomized controlled trial; Fifty-four patients, aged 18 to 70 years, with chronic tendinopathy were randomized to receive either a blinded injection containing platelet-rich plasma or saline (placebo group) in addition to an eccentric training program. The validated mean Victorian Institute of Sports Assessment-Achilles score improved in both the platelet-rich plasma group and the placebo group after 1 year. There was no significant difference in increase between both groups (adjusted between-group difference, 5.5; 95% confidence interval, −4.9 to 15.8, P = .292). This randomized controlled trial showed no clinical and ultrasonographic superiority of platelet-rich plasma injection over a placebo injection.

Overall conclusion: Based on the systematic review and original research, the potential risks involved with PRP are fortunately very low. PRP got the potentiality to facilitate healing and earlier return to sport after musculoskeletal injury, but benefits remain unproven to date and there is a need for high quality studies with a randomized design. Aspetar is currently performing a level I evidence research project into the benefits of PRP in muscle injuries.

Myocardial infarction (MI) is one of the most common sudden onset heart diseases. Early diagnosis of MI is essential for management and treatment initiation. Electrocardiogram (ECG), as a noninvasive electrical recording of the heart behavior is one of the most reliable diagnostic tools for identifying patients with suspected MI. The QRS complex is the major feature of an ECG. There have been many researches for QRS detection algorithms. However, the current QRS detection algorithms have high false detections due to various types of noise or disturbances and sudden changes in the QRS complex.

We propose a novel QRS detection algorithm based on the use of simple pattern matching techniques in order to increase the accuracy of QRS detection. The algorithm aims to achieve better detection by grouping different ECG waveforms into 5 fundamental groups and then proceeding towards correction of detections based on this classification.

ECG had to be first filtered for high frequency noise and drift in order to be diagnostically useful. The filtered ECG is classified into standard and nonstandard groups using parabolic fitting. The QRS detection is performed on these groups. The algorithm proceeded by re-classifying the waveforms into 5 fundamental types of ECG. It then improved the detections using temporal correlation between successive ECG beats for further corrections. After all the appropriate corrections, identical waveform types on each lead were presented. The efficiency of the algorithm was also calculated from its true detection rate. QRS detection algorithm was tested using 20 MI patient data from the PTB diagnostic ECG database.

The algorithm resulted in a true detection rate of 98.9%. Our experiment showed that 199 leads among the 220 leads in 20 data sets were successfully classified into the five major groups. This proved to be a key step towards improving the accuracy of the algorithm as most of the waveforms belong to these major groups. As expected, our results confirmed that typical ECG waveforms are composed of successive ECG beats of similar patterns with little variation from one ECG beat to another.

We consider the deformation of a blood vessel imbedded in soft tissue that is surrounded by a rigid structure. The vessel deforms when the difference between its external and internal pressures exceeds a certain value. To represent the deformation, we use a physical model consisting of two concentric cylinders tethered by numerous nonlinear springs representing the biological tissues surrounding the vessel (see Figure A ); the outer cylinder is taken to be rigid while the inner one is taken to be thin-walled, elastic and free to deform. We formulate the governing equations, and develop suitable numerical techniques for calculating the shape of the cross section of a deformed vessel and the blood flow rate through it (see Figure B ). The dependence of the deformation and the blood flow rate on the elastic parameters is shown (numerically) to be a convex function of the elastic parameters. This allows the formation of a well behaved “Inverse Problem,” where the elasticity of the surrounding soft tissue can be detected from the (measurable) data consisting of: pressure, cross sectional shape and blood flow rate. Since testing the elasticity of human tissue can only be done in vivo, and since such information is important as aid in the diagnosis of some diseases, the present study serves as an advancement in the non-invasive testing of the elasticity of certain soft tissues in the human body.

Background: More than 45% of CML patients in Qatar resist the first line of treatment; Internationally, certain ABL mutations are the most common cause of IM resistance

Objectives: To screen for BCR-ABL kinase mutations in CML patients treated in Qatar and to study if point mutations can be correlated with resistance to treatment.

Methods: Peripheral Blood (PB) and Bone Marrow (BM) samples were collected from 25 patients; total RNA was extracted and cDNA was produced via RT-PCR with special precautions to avoid amplification of wild type ABL and cover the whole ABL kinase domain.

Results: Over a period of three years, 39 PB and 30 BM samples from 25 patients receiving IM were studied for ABL mutations prior to treatment and at time of resistance.

For all 25 patients we noticed three nucleotide changes at A1258G, A1426G and A1739G of ABL (GenBank accession no. M14752). However, when we compared these changes with major SNP databases (NCBI, ENSEMBL), these changes were described by others as ancestral allele that does not convey any pathological changes.

Although, we found no evidence of ABL point mutations in patients at time of resistance, in one patient, who had complex cytogenetic abnormalities, we noticed a transient insertion of three nucleotides (AAG) at position 1432 which added an amino acid Lysine356 at time of resistance.

This patient was shifted to dasatinib and achieved major molecular response after three months of treatment.

Conclusions: Due to high rate of resistance of CML to IM, we tested our patients for BCR-ABL points mutations and could not reveal any of the described ABL domain mutations.

The significance of the insertion of the three nucleotides is still to be determined.

However, it must be kept in mind that direct sequencing has a limited sensitivity and might miss a low level mutation (less than 30% of the total ABL domain).

An alternative approach such as High Resolution Melting (HRM) technology accompanied with sequencing might be needed to detect and quantify low level mutations.

Background: Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) remain as an important public health problem in most developed and developing countries and may also result in temporary or permanent disability.

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the incidence pattern of the burden of severe TBIs among young children in Qatar and to suggest practical prevention policies that can be implemented in Qatar.

Methods: The study was conducted among children aged 14 years or less at the Children Rehabilitation Unit, Paediatric Department, Hamad General Hospital. Severity of TBI was assessed by Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS).

Results: This study based on 65 children suffering from severe traumatic brain injury from January 2002 to December 2008, 12 of them died within the first month of admission in paediatric intensive care unit. The predominant gender was male (73.8 %), non-Qatari form 50.8%. In our study predominant mechanisms of injury were road traffic accident (84.6%), then falls (10.8%), other causes like head trauma by roof fan blade (4.6%), followed by sports and recreation injuries. Among our patients 43.1 % had spasticity, 33.8% experienced posttraumatic epilepsy. The current study revealed that 24.6 % had communication disorder, 26.2 % had poor cognition, 24.6% had hemiplegia, 18.5 % had abnormal behavior and 15.4 % had a vegetative state. Nearly all the patients (98.5%) required physiotherapy and occupational therapy, 50.8% of them required speech therapy and swallowing assessment, 47.7 % required braces either ankle foot orthosis or hands splints, 16.9 % required behavior therapy, whereas Botox injection was used in 60% of the spastic patient. Finally, the incidence of TBIs from road traffic crashes and injuries in Qatar are increasing significantly compared to the other developing and developed countries.

Conclusion: The present study findings provided an overview of severeTBI in Qatar which mostly related to the road traffic crashes and injuries. Special efforts should be made to reduce further motor vehicle crashes and injuries involving young people and welfare programs are also needed to limit the risk of TBI.

Many animals have evolved mechanisms to withstand the harsh desert environment, characterized by extreme high temperatures and scarce water supplies. The Arabian Camel, and the Arabian Oryx are valued economically and culturally. These animals can survive for several days without food or water. As the Arabian peninsula undergoes rapid and vast industrial changes, it is increasingly important to understand the biological aspects of these animals.

From the unicellular microbes to the sophisticated multi-cellular animals, sensing the chemical composition of the surrounding environment is essential for survival. The vertebrate chemosensory receptors genes, which are members of the seven transmembrane -helical G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), are encoded by six different multigene families. Four of these genes encode receptor proteins for sensing odors. The olfactory (odorant) receptors (ORs) are predominately expressed in the sensory neurons of the main olfactory epithelium, and can sense either water-soluble (class I) or volatile (class II) molecules. Furthermore, certain OR genes are expressed in non-olfactory tissues, such as brain, kidney, testis, and placenta.

Being adapted to very harsh conditions with elevated temperature, scarce water supply and limited vegetation, we hypothesize that desert animals have evolved the ability to detect water either from volatiles liberated by water in the environment or through the blooming of short-lived vegetation, via their olfactory systems.

To explore this possibility we have undertaken the study of the Camel OR genes. We identified approximately one hundred candidate OR genes, all of which are ortholgos to OR genes in other mammals and most closely related to those of the Equus caballus. Preliminary analysis revealed an enrichment in OR gene family 2/13, found in the highest proportion in aquatic animals, as compared to other mammals. This finding provides the intriguing suggestion that desert animals have evolved specific OR genes to adapt to the desert ecosystem.

We are currently working to identify the complete OR gene repertoire in the Camel, and to identify and characterize the OR subgenome in other desert animals such as the Arabian Oryx.

Background: CML is the most common myeloproliferative disease observed among adults, its 1st line of treatment is IM with a response rate ranging between 55 – 90%. In Qatar the resistance rate is higher than 45%. Our collaborators in Italy recently reported on the relation between CML and PTPRG.

Methods: One cohort of patients (n=25, period=3years) receiving Imatinib was studied for haematological, cytogenetic molecular and biochemical abnormalities.

Our collaborators in Italy examined different CML cell lines and an independent cohort of patients for the level of expression of PTPRG using QPCR, clonogenic assays, methylation-specific PCR, flow cytometry and western blotting.

Results: Our team reported previously on the high rate of resistance of CML to IM (45%). During this forum the team is further reporting on the possible underlying mechanisms behind this resistance (see Al-Dewik et al at this forum) Despite a few positive findings, no pattern could be identified to delineate a significant underlying mechanism.

Our collaborators in Italy, identified that down-regulation of PTPRG increased colony formation in the PTPRG+ve megakaryocytic MEG-01 and LAMA-84, but had no effect in the PTPRG-ve K562 and KYO-1.

Its over-expression had an oncosuppressive effect in all four cell lines and is associated with inhibition of BCR/ABL-dependent signalling. PTPRG was down-regulated at the mRNA and protein levels in CML patients in both PB and BM, including CD34+ cells, and is re-expressed following molecular remission of disease.

This re-expression was associated with loss of methylation of a CpG island of PTPRG promoter in 55% patients. In K562 cells, the hypomethylating agent 5-aza-2’-deoxycytidine induced PTPRG expression and caused inhibition of colony formation that was partially reverted by antisense-mediated down-regulation of PTPRG expression.

Conclusions: Although this study was done on 2 independent patient populations, it suggests that in CML populations with high resistance rate it might be worth examining the PTPRG expression level and correlate it with the pattern of resistance. Our group has secured 3 years funding from QNRF (NPRP 4-157-3-052) to investigate PTPRG signalling in CML, including the study of a possible link among the high CML resistance and the PTPRG expression levels.

Background: The importance of countries to support their own national pharmacovigilance cannot be understated: citizens may have unique ethnicities, traditions, and diets influencing reaction to medication; alternate brands of therapy may be imported or manufactured and differ in ingredients or production processes; ADRs and toxicities associated with traditional and herbal remedies also need to be monitored. The objective of this study is to inventory national pharmacovigilance systems in place in the Middle East region.

Methods: The Uppsala Monitoring Center Assessment of Country Pharmacovigilance Situation (February 2008) was adapted and translated into Arabic. Survey domains pertain to general program overview; information technology support; suspected ADR reporting and subsequent data use; pharmacovigilance activity and advocacy. A comprehensive search was conducted to determine the existence of a governing body responsible for medication safety in 13 Arabic speaking Middle Eastern countries. Surveys were emailed to the head of the identified centres, with follow-up messages and telephone calls subsequently made as necessary.

Results: Data for 10 countries was obtained: representatives from two countries did not respond (Lebanon, Syria). Six described formal national pharmacovigilance programs (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE), while five (Bahrain, Kuwait, Palestine, Qatar, Yemen) reported no active program or designated center. All active programs were recently formed (< 5 years). The majority (83%) are government funded and two (33%) receive suspected ADR reports and offer drug information services. Most (83%) welcomed reports from a wide variety of health professionals, as well as from the public. Sixty-seven percent facilitated submission to the centre by email, but none directly through a web-based platform. All used the information for drug regulatory purposes but only 2 (33%) reported dissemination of safety information to the public.

Conclusion: This is the first comprehensive review of the status of pharmacovigilance in the Middle East. While a number of countries participate in suspected ADR reporting activities, an estimated population of 30–50 million is without formal domestic programs. Technology must be exploited to ease spontaneous reporting and subsequent data management. Existing mechanisms for regional collaboration should be advanced so experience from model programs can be shared.

Background: Autoinflammatory diseases are a group of disorders characterized by seemingly unprovoked inflammation in the absence of high-titer autoantibodies or antigen-specific T cells. Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) is an autosomal recessive disorder. It is characterized by recurrent self-limiting episodes of fever and painful polyserositis. FMF is prevalent in specific ethnic groups—namely, non-Ashkenazi Jews, Armenians, Turks, and Arabs. There seems to be a distinctive clinical picture in Arab patients with FMF, and the range and distribution of MEFV mutations is different from that noted in other commonly affected ethnic groups.

Objectives: The aim of this study is to delineate the spectrum and distribution of MEFV mutations amongst an Arabic FMF patient cohort and to assist the genotype-phenotype correlation in these patients.

Methods: We have collected DNA samples from 188 FMF patients (from Qatar, Jordan and Palestine) who have been clinically diagnosed with FMF, according to international and validated diagnostic criteria. We have designed primers to cover the entire genomic region of MEFV. As a first tier, mutation detection is done by resequencing the entire coding sequence and splice sites; as a second tier the rest of the genomic region including the promoter are resequenced.

Results: In the first tier, we have identified 191 out of 376 mutant alleles (50%) by resequencing the entire coding region and splice sites of MEFV. In addition, resequencing of the entire genomic region of 100 patients who had only one identifiable allele was carried resulting in the identification of specific haplotypes and we are currently investigating the phenotypic significance of these haplotypes.

Conclusions: The spectrum of MEFV mutations in Arabs seems different from other ethnic groups commonly affected by FMF. The fraction of the identifiable disease causing alleles is the lowest amongst the commonly affected ethnic groups. The results of the genomic resequencing of MEFV may provide some insight into the role of non-coding sequences and may explain the molecular pathology of FMF. Thereby, we are currently working on the development of a low cost and high throughput technique to facilitate the resequencing of the entire genomic sequence of MEFV using Next Generation sequencing technology.

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease posing a considerable worldwide health problem due to its high prevalence, associated morbidity and high health-care costs. It is a multifactorial “complex” disorder, with compelling evidence for a genetic predisposition. On the other hand, Majeed syndrome, a Mendelian disorder of bone and skin inflammation is caused by homozygous mutations in LPIN2. Many observations have implicated LPIN2 in the genetic etiology of psoriasis, including its position in a psoriasis locus. We identified several non-synonymous SNPs within the LPIN2 in patients with psoriasis that are not present in healthy controls.

We hypothesize that the variations in LPIN2 play a role in the susceptibility to development of psoriasis and that LPIN2 is the psoriasis susceptibility locus on 18p. We aim to examine this hypothesis by examining the properties of the wild type and mutant proteins, as well as examining any difference in function between the wild type and mutants.

We have obtained custom synthesized cDNA clones encoding the full Lipin2 wild type protein and the six identified mutant proteins (p.K387E, p.S734L, p.A331S, p.L504F, p.P348L, p.E601K). The cDNA clones were subcloned into pYES2 vector for expression in yeast cells (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). Each construct was transformed into Saccharomyces cerevisiae for protein expression. The analysis utilizes SDS Gel Electophoresis and Western Blot.

The DNA analysis indicates that each fragment has been correctly cloned into the pYES2 vector. The analyses using SDS Gel Electrophoresis and Western Blot indicate that the Wild type and p.K387E are successfully expressed in S. cerevisiae while p.S734L is expressed in S. cerevisiae but at a lower level. Expression experiments are being done on the 4 remaining mutant proteins.

We were successful in artificially expressing the human Lipin2 protein in its different forms in yeast cells. We are currently optimizing the conditions to produce substantial amounts of the proteins to be studied by Circular dichroism to determine the folding patterns. Other methods will be approached to study the function.

Background: Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain characterized by an enduring predisposition to generate recurrent epileptic seizures, as well as, the neurobiologic, cognitive, psychological, and social consequences. The estimated proportion of the general population with active epilepsy at a given time is 10 per 1,000 people. The cause of epilepsy remains unknown in a substantial proportion of affected individuals. There is considerable evidence of the role of genetics in the predisposition to epileptic seizures. There is a need to identify the genes that predispose to epilepsy.

Objectives: The objective of this study is to attempt at the identification of the genes responsible for specific forms of familial epilepsy by using homozygosity mapping and mutation detection analyses.

Methods: In this study we recruit families in which epilepsy segregates in a suggested autosomal recessive pattern. Homozygosity mapping is applied after genotyping with 370K SNP chips (Illumina platform). The gene identification is performed by candidate gene approach and direct resequencing.

Results: We recruited a consanguineous two-generation family with five affected individuals from two related sibships. All patients were clinically diagnosed and the clinical picture delineated. The gene responsible for the epilepsy in this family has been mapped to a 10 MB region on chromosome 11. At least 10 candidate genes, including SHANK2, SYT12, CFL1 and KCNK4 were examined for mutations but no specific mutations were identified as of yet.

Conclusion: Further examination of other candidate genes is ongoing. However, genomic sequencing utilizing next-generation sequencing technology is in progress.

Background: Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in Qatar, incidence rate is rising and it is often diagnosed at advanced stages. Early detection of breast cancer through regular screening activities has been found to decrease morbidity and mortality rates. Although research on breast cancer screening in the Middle East is scarce, low levels of knowledge and poor participation rates have been found to act as barriers towards breast cancer screening activities such as breast self-examination, clinical breast examination and mammography. Various other barriers have been described in the literature. Identification of these potential barriers and facilitators is urgently needed in order to develop culturally appropriate interventions aiming to improve awareness and breast cancer screening participation rates.

Objectives: A three-phase research program for which the goals are to (1) Understand breast health issues in Qatar; (2) Identify and implement strategies that assist Arabic women's participation in breast cancer screening activities (3) Evaluate, facilitate and sustain these strategies.

Methods: In Phase 1 two studies are conducted. Study 1: this quantitative study examines data from a convenience sample of 1063 Arabic women in Qatar on a cross sectional community based survey. Face to face interviews are used to investigate knowledge, attitudes, practices, barriers and facilitators regarding breast cancer screening activities. Study 2: Using an ethnographic qualitative methodology, this study will capture the complexity and diversity of reasons of health behaviour choices on a purposive sample of 50 women, 50 men and 30 health care providers.

Results: Preliminary results from study 1 will be presented. These will include: participation rates of breast cancer screening activities of Arabic women in Qatar such as breast self-examination, clinical breast examination and mammography; levels of knowledge of breast cancer and its screening; identified barriers and facilitators to breast cancer screening as experienced by these women.

Conclusion: Combined results will enable development of culturally appropriate intervention strategies to raise awareness and participation rate in breast cancer screening among Arabic women living in Qatar and the Gulf region.

Background: Previous reports demonstrated polymorphisms in the CHL1 gene located on chromosome 3p26 (close homologue of L1) are associated with schizophrenia among different ethnic populations. The aim of this study is to investigate the associations of the haplotypes of the theses genetic marker (SNPs) of CHL1 gene locus; rs2055314(C/T), rs2272522 (C/T) and rs331894 (A/G) with schizophrenia patients in Qatar populations.

Methods: A case control study association was carried out on 48 Qatari schizophrenic patients [from Psychiatry Hospital, Hamad Medical Corporation, Qatar] and 47 unrelated, healthy, control Qatari subjects. Schizophrenia was diagnosed according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) criteria for schizophrenia by two independent psychiatrists. Genotyping of SNP rs2055314 (C/T) rs2272522 (C/T) and rs331894 (A/G) was carried out by the 5' nuclease assay using TaqMan MGB probe by means of an ABI 7500 [Applied Biosystems].

Results: All SNPs are within the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE). The frequency distribution of the genotype rs2055314 (C/T) revealed that (35.30%), (31.25%), had CC and (35.30%), [58.33%] had CT, and (29.41%), [10.42%] had TT among control and schizophrenic patients, respectively with P value= 0.034. The minor allele frequency (T) was 0.361 for all subjects, with odds ratio =0.84 and 95% CI was (0.37–1.91) with P value= 0.67 between cases and controls. Using the genetic recessive model, odds ratio was 4.00 and 95% CI was (0.96–16.69) with P value= 0.05 between cases and controls. The frequency distribution of the genotype rs331894 (G/A) revealed that (12.77%), (6.25%), had GG and (40.42%), [50.00%] had GA, and (47.65%), [43.75%] had AA among control and schizophrenic patients, respectively with P value= 0.003. The minor allele frequency (G) was 0.407 for all subjects, with odds ratio =0.28 and 95% CI was (0.12–0.65) with P value= 0.002 between cases and controls. Using the genetic recessive model, odds ratio was 22.00 and 95% CI was (2.40–221.49) with P value= 0.0005 between cases and controls.

Conclusion: Our findings therefore strengthen the association between the CHL1 gene markers; rs2055314 and rs331894 with schizophrenia and also support the view that cell adhesion molecules could be involved in the etiology of this disease among Qatari patients.

Minimally invasive surgery assisted by robots has shown higher efficiency and precision. In spite of the good performance of the state of the art surgery robotics systems, the size and number of external incisions required by instruments should be reduced to lower the scarring and incisional pain experienced by the patient. Other important improvement derived from the use of smaller incisions is the diminishment of time required for recovery.

This research develops a flexible scope of small diameter driven by segmented multiple actuators to produce a deflection of the imaging probe at its distal end providing better visualization than the current rigid cameras. The research is conducted in cooperation with the Biorobotics Laboratory at the University of Washington USA, where our scope will be incorporated to Raven, a 7-DOF cable-actuated surgical robot.

The flexible scope is composed of three segments as illustrated in Figure 1, where it is possible to see that the device contains a ring of cables enclosed externally and internally by two different springs and a semi rigid covering. The main mechanism of bending is the compression and extension of the external spring at the distal end. The change of length in this spring is controlled by an active system that combines pulling and releasing actions through the ring of cables.

The device has advantages in its simplicity of actuation and the high elasticity and flexibility at the distal end. In the current state of the project, a testing system is under construction.

Background: Transcription factor NFKB is activated by several processes including inflammation, endoplasmic-reticulum (ER) stress, increased Akt signaling and enhanced proteasomal degradation. Calreticulin is an ER Ca²⁺ binding chaperone, which regulates many cellular processes. Previously, we have shown that loss of calreticulin function results in the activation of ER stress that is accompanied by a significant increase in the proteasome activity. These changes increase the resistance of calreticulin deficient cells to apoptosis. A role for calreticulin has also been described in the regulation of immune response.

Objectives: To examine the role of calreticulin in the activation of NFKB signaling leading to enhanced resistance to apoptosis of these cells.

Methods:: Wild type and calreticulin deficient cells were used for measurement of transcriptional activity of NFKB. Cells were co-transfected with of NFKB reporter and-gal reporter plasmids followed by reporter gene assays. Western blot analysis was utilized to examine changes in protein expression.

Results: Our data illustrate a significant decrease in the basal transcriptional activity of NFKB upon loss of calreticulin function. Furthermore, treatment with lipopolysaccharide increased the transcriptional activity of NFKB in both the wild type and calreticulin deficient cells. However, the transcriptional activity of NFKB was still significantly lower in the calreticulin deficient cells as compared to the wild type cells. Our data also showed that the reduced NFKB activity in calreticulin deficient cells is not due to decreased p65 or p50 protein levels. To determine the mechanism of decreased NFKB activity we examined changes in IKB protein stability. Our data showed a significant increase in the IKB protein level due to decreased level of phosphorylated IKB protein. Furthermore, we illustrated that loss of calreticulin function resulted in increased protein phosphatase2A activity that was abolished by Okadaic acid treatment. Inhibition of IKB de-phosphorylation decreased its ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation.

Conclusion: Our data suggests that the reduced transcriptional activity of NFKB upon loss of calreticulin function is mediated via stabilization of IKB protein. To our knowledge, this is the first report on the role of calreticulin in the regulation of NFKB function.

This research was carried out to examine the awareness about HIV/AIDS. Introduction: AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, which attacks human immunity and can be incubated up to 10 years without symptoms. The infection can be transmitted through blood by injection or injury with infected tools and through sexual relations with infected persons. Rationale: As HIV/Aids awareness is lacking, we believe that educating the society on this matter will help prevent spreading the virus. Methods: Our research is based on a survey/questionnaire distributed to students, teachers and some friends who were selected randomly. In addition, we interviewed a clinical psychiatrist & focused on her AIDS patients while maintaining their anonymity. Results: Our research shows that 84% of the participants have a general idea about AIDS. Fortunately 74% of them recognize that AIDS is a dangerous disease. When asking about the mechanism of HIV work inside the body, 56% of the participants were able to answer the question correctly; and when asked about the ways of transmission, 47% said blood transfusion, 41% thought sexual relations, 46% answered needles, 45% thought it gets transferred from mother to fetus, 42% answered from lactating mother to her infant, and 40% thought through surgical tools of dentist. Interview results showed that the HIV carriers might have psychological disturbances according to their behavior. Conclusion: Most of the study population have come across this disease and are aware of its level of seriousness. Unfortunately they are not aware of further scientific such as ways of transmission, symptoms or prevention.

Background: Ectopic pregnancy is an increasing health risk for women that cause maternal death in the first trimester. The incidence of ectopic pregnancy is 1–2% of pregnant women. The Fallopian tubes are the most common site of implantation (95.5%). Risk factors are higher in women with damaged fallopian tubes. Ultrasound (US) and (-hCG) are the diagnostic tools. Management includes medical (methotrexate(MTX)) and surgical (laparotomy or laparoscopic) approaches.

Objectives: The objective of this study is to shed the light on the management of advanced ectopic pregnancy diagnosed according to the (-hCG>5000) or the presence of fetal heart beat using US, in relation to age, medical history, diagnosis, treatment in both Qatar and Bahrain.

Methods: This study was conducted at Hamad Medical Corporation (Qatar) and Bahrain Defense Force Hospital (Bahrain). After obtaining the ethical approval needed, all cases of ectopic pregnancies between 2007-2011 were included. Data were collected from medical records on the approved data-collecting sheet then statistically analyzed using SPSS 19 software. Analyses included descriptive statistics, cross tab and Chi-square Tests, 95% confidence intervals and odd ratios.

Results: Out of 534 cases of ectopic pregnancies enrolled in this study, 127 (23.8%) were from Bahrain and 407 (76.2%) were from Qatar. The percentage of advance cases was 15% from Bahrain and 41% from Qatar. In Bahrain, treatments utilized are: laparatomy and salpingectomy (84.2%), (5.3%) MTX alone and MTX followed by laparatomy and salpingectomy (10.5%), while in Qatar it was laparoscopy and salpingectomy(77.6%), MTX alone (19.4%), MTX followed by laparoscopy and salpingectomy (3%). In both countries, Left tube is the common side of implantation in case of advance ectopic (52.2%) and high incidence (21.7%) of tubal rupture was found in all advanced ectopic cases.

Conclusions: Management of advanced ectopic pregnancy was mainly surgical based on gestational sac size and patient's age. Laparoscopy in Qatar and laparatomy in Bahrain were the treatment of choice to treat advance ectopic cases. Further investigation to compare mother's fertility after different surgical approaches is recommended.

Epithelial ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecologic malignancy with the majority of cases being diagnosed after the disease has become metastatic according to the report by Obstetrics and Gynecology, Duke University Medical Center USA, 2008.

Consequently, genetic and epigenetic changes that disturb motility are likely to be important for the pathogenesis of ovarian cancer. Although ovarian cancer can be cured in up to 90% of cases while still confined to the ovary, approximately 70% are diagnosed after the occurrence of peritoneal dissemination, when the cure rate reduces to less than 30% according to recent studies by Global Cancer Statistic, CA Cancer 2011.

Recent reports have shown 25% of most cancerous cells within tumors have the features of cancer stem cells (CSCs). CSCs have been identified on the basis of their ability to self-renew and to have the capacity to differentiate into cancer cells and also form tumors in animal model.

We already demonstrated that the majority of cells of ovarian cancer cell line (OVCAR) expressed CD133 and CD117 antigen. The CD133 antigen is a 120 kDa membrane glycoprotein, detected first time in CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells and thus this antigen has been widely used to identify and facilitate the isolation of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. CD117 or stem cell factor receptor (c-Kit), also detected in Haemopoietic stem and progenitor cells. This protein is a type 3 transmembrane receptor for MGF (mast cell growth factor).

CD133and CD117 has been considered as a marker of CSCs. Also OVCAR CD133- cells subpopulation in “in vitro” culture can generate a subpopulation of OVCAR CD133+ cells, probably via Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition (EMT).

EMT describes a mechanism by which cells lose their epithelial characteristics and acquire more migratory mesenchymal properties. It also seems to have a key role in the acquisition of invasive and migratory properties in many types of carcinoma cells.

We aim to determine whether the transformation of these cancer cells in CSCs is dependent on the tumor type and on signaling pathways. We will be using genomic and proteomic analysis OVCAR CD133+/- and CD117+/- cells for targeting the EMT pathway.

Obesity is a major health problem that has reached epidemic levels worldwide. Obesity is considered a highly heritable and genetically heterogeneous disorder. Despite the improvement in our understanding of the genetic basis of obesity, the underlying genetic cause of most families with extreme obesity is still unknown.

In this study, we aim to elucidate the missing heritability of obesity in bariatric surgery patients with familial history of obesity. About 100 probands from France, the UK and Qatar will be screened for known obesity variants in MC4R (and LEP if belong to consanguineous family) by Sanger sequencing and for two obesity-causing microdeletions at chr16p11.2 by MLPA. The families of ten of these probands not showing known monogenic obesity variants will be further analysed to seek new rare obesity-causing variants by whole exome sequencing and Illumina genotyping. We will examine the effect of the identified variants at the gene expression level by performing expression profiling analysis in blood and insulin-responsive tissues (muscle, liver, subcutaneous and visceral fat) from the probands and in blood for the other family members. Moreover, we will investigate the effect of the variants on obesity surgery outcomes such as weight loss and reoperation rates.

Bariatric surgery offers a valuable opportunity to collect tissues from obese patients that can allow the integration of genetic information with gene expression to investigate the genetic basis of obesity. This research will provide novel insight into better health care protocols such as personalised medicine and genetic counselling for obesity, and could lead to the development of better treatment options for the future.

Parkinson's disease (PD) (OMIM168600) is the second most common age-related neurodegenerative disorder worldwide with a prevalence of more than 1% in people over 65 years old. The major hallmark of PD brain change is the formation of Lewy bodies, which are mainly composed of a protein called alpha-synuclein (encoded by the SNCA gene), aggregated together with other proteins.

Genetic variants of SNCA have been reported to be involved in both familial as well as sporadic cases of PD. Many of these variants result in the over-expression of the encoded protein making it prone to aggregation.

This report describes investigation of methylation of the two CpG islands in SNCA in brain samples from PD patients.

Fifty three DNA samples were made from cerebellum of PD brains, to add to 268 existing DNA samples. In the first part of the study, confirmation of suspected monogenic PD mutations was carried out using PCR and sequencing. However, no mutation was detected. Possible reasons for the discrepancy between predicted and observed results are discussed. In addition, 250 PD cases were screened for three monogenic mutations in SNCA using commercial service and found that none of these cases have the mutations.

In the second part of the study, DNA methylation of two SNCA CpG islands was assessed in seven different brain regions of ten PD cases using bisulfite sequencing. No significant difference was observed in DNA methylation of CpG 1, as well as CpG 2, when compared to the studied brain regions.

Genetic and epigenetic studies on PD can help to provide better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the disease and its progression, enhancing our ability to discover and develop better treatment options for the future.

In spite of the current proliferation of the use of computers in education in the Arab world, complete suites of solutions for students with special needs are very scarce. This paper presents an assistive system managing learning content for children with moderate to mild intellectual disabilities. The system provides educational multimedia contents, inspired from the local environment, in different subjects such as math, science, religion, daily life skills, and others to target specific learning goals suitable for this group of learners. The system tracks the individual student progress against the student individualized learning plan assigned by the specialized teacher and according to the learner abilities. Upon completion of learning a particular task, the system will test the learner to order a set of sub-tasks in its logical sequence necessary to successfully accomplish the main task. The system also facilitates deploying intelligent tutoring algorithms to automatically correct mistakes after a number of trials working adaptively with the learner to successfully learn how to complete the task.

With the huge success of cellular mobile radio communications, demand for wireless services, applications, and technologies is expected to increase further. Such an increase forces recently emerging technologies (e.g., 4G) to coexist with the old ones (e.g., 2G–3G) in next generation wireless networks (NGWNs). In order for NGWNs to support all of these services and applications with the ever-increasing demand, wireless radio interference needs to be handled in an effective manner. Interference is a phenomenon which degrades the overall system capacity, affects the quality of service, and causes call drops and unnecessary handoffs in cellular mobile systems.

Interference is a very important concept from the perspective of military and of national security. Both unintentional and intentional interference, which is also known as jamming, should be cleared away as soon as possible for security reasons. Therefore, identification of interference in a reliable manner is a crucial task for all of the future wireless communications systems.

In this study, identification of radio interference in NGWNs is established. The proposed method takes into account the general characteristics of wireless propagation environments.

Since it is difficult to completely define a general wireless propagation environment, statistical properties of widely used propagation environment classification such as urban and suburban is analyzed. Both first- and second-order of the statistical characteristics of wireless propagation environments are considered.

It is shown that the proposed method can identify the presence of interference under practical scenarios in a reliable manner.

In addition, it is demonstrated that the absence of a priori knowledge about the ambient noise power does not affect the performance of the proposed method.

Interference management is predicted to be an essential part of the system design for emerging NGWNs. Interference is also extremely important for military and national security applications and services. Therefore, identification of any form of interference in a reliable manner is of crucial importance. In this study, a method that can identify the presence of interference reliably under practical scenarios is proposed. The method proposed does need any a priori information to identify the interference.

One of the major challenges in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is limitation in the available computational speeds, especially when it comes to N-body problems. Application of the graphics processing units (GPU) are considered as an alternative to the traditional CPU usage for some CFD applications to fully utilize the computational power and parallelism of modern graphics hardware. In the present work a Matlab simulation tool has been developed to study the flow at the wall-fluid interface at nano scale in a micro-fluidic system. Micro-fluidics has become progressively important in recent years in order to address the demand for increased efficiency in a wide range application in advanced systems such as “lab-on-a-chip”. Lab-on-a-chip devices are miniature micro fluidics (labs) to perform biological test such as proteomics, or chemical analysis/synthesis of very exothermic reactions. For simulation in such cases, it takes few hours to simulate a particular set of parameters even when run in parallel mode at the TAMUQ supercomputer. In order to accelerate the simulation, the Matlab program has been ported to C/C++ program that exploits the GPU's (Graphics Processing Unit) massive parallel processing capabilities. Results from both methods will be shown and conclusions be drawn.

Human-annotated data is an important resource for most natural language processing (NLP) systems. Most linguistically annotated text for Arabic NLP is in the news domain, but systems that rely on this data do not generalize well to other domains. We describe ongoing efforts to compile a dataset of 28 Arabic Wikipedia articles spanning four topical domains—sports, history, technology, and science. Each article in the dataset is annotated with three types of linguistic structure: named entities, syntax and lexical semantics. We adapted traditional approaches to linguistic annotation in order to make them accessible to our annotators (undergraduate native speakers of Arabic) and to better represent the important characteristics of the chosen domains.

For the named entity (NE) annotation, we start with the task of marking boundaries of expressions in the traditional Person, Location and Organization classes. However, these categories do not fully capture the important entities discussed in domains like science, technology, and sports. Therefore, where our annotators feel that these three classes are inadequate for a particular article, they are asked to introduce new classes. Our data analysis indicates that both the designation of article-specific entity classes and the token-level annotation are accomplished with a high level of inter-annotator agreement.

Syntax is our most complex linguistic annotation, which includes morphology information, part-of-speech tags, syntactic governance and dependency roles of individual words. While following a standard annotation framework, we perform quality control by evaluating inter-annotator agreement as well as eliciting annotations for sentences that have been previously annotated so as to compare the results.

The lexical semantics annotation consists of supersense tags, coarse-grained representations of noun and verb meanings. The 30 noun classes include person, quantity, and artifact; the 15 verb tags include motion, emotion, and perception. These classes provide a middle-ground abstraction of the large semantic space of the language. We have developed a flexible web-based interface, which allows annotators to review preprocessed text and add the semantic tags.

Ultimately, these linguistic annotations will be publicly released, and we expect that they will facilitate NLP research and applications for an expanded variety of text domains.

Oil and gas companies spend millions of dollars on inspection of pipelines every year. The type of equipment used in carrying out the inspections is very sophisticated and requires very specialized manpower. In this article we present a novel approach to pipeline inspection using a small mobile robot and an omnidirectional vision system. It is a combination of a reflective convex mirror and a perspective camera. Panoramic videos captured by the camera from the mirror are either stored or transmitted to a monitoring station to examine the inner surface of the pipeline. The videos are prepped, unwrapped, and unwarped to get a realistic image of the whole inner surface area of the pipeline. Several mirror shapes and unwarping techchniques are used here to show the efficiency of this inspection technique. The image acquisition is instantaneous with a large field of view, which makes their use in dynamic environment suitable. The cost of such system is relatively low compared to other available inspections systems.

Qatar is a leading natural gas producer and exporter in the world. Most of the natural gas (and oil) of Qatar is extracted from offshore wells, and then it is transferred to onshore for processing. In addition, Qatar is connected to UAE by one of the world's longest underwater pipelines (managed by Dolphin Energy), to transfer processed gas from the offshore north field to the UAE. Security of such critical offshore infrastucture against threats along with the environmental and preventive maintenance monitoring (e.g., pollution, leakage) are of utmost importance. A wireless underwater sensor network can be deployed for the security and safety of underwater pipelines. However, underwater acoustic communication brings its own challenges such as limited transmission range, low data rates and link unreliability.

In this paper, we propose “cooperative communication” as an enabling technology to meet the challenging demands in underwater acoustic communication (UWAC). Specifically, we consider a multi-carrier and multi-relay UWAC system and investigate relay (partner) selection rules in a cooperation scenario. For relay selection, we consider different selection criteria, which rely either on the maximization of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or the minimization of probability of error (PoE). These are used in conjunction with so-called per-subcarrier, allsubcarriers, or subcarrier grouping approaches in which one or more relays are selected.

In our simulation study, we choose an offshore area in the North Eastern side of Qatar (which coincides with the North Field) and conduct an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study for the chosen location to demonstrate the performance of the proposed UWAC system. Our channel model builds on an aggregation of both large-scale path loss and small-scale fading. For acoustic path loss modeling, we use the ray-tracing algorithm Bellhop software to precisely reflect the characteristics of the simulation location such as the sound speed profile, sound frequency, bathymetry, type of bottom sediments, depths of nodes, etc (See Fig.1 ). Our simulation results for the error rate performance have demonstrated significant performance improvements over direct transmission schemes and highlighted the enhanced link reliability made possible by cooperative communications (See Fig.2 ).

Over the past few years, advances in the field of molecular biology and genomic technologies have led to an explosive growth of digital biological information. The analysis of this large amount of data is commonly based on the extensive and repeated use of conceptually parallel algorithms, most notably in the context of sequence alignment. Cloud computing provides scientists with a completely new model of utilizing the computing infrastructure. Cloud computing model is excellent in dealing with such bioinformatics applications, which require both management of huge amounts of data and heavy computations.

The study aims at transforming a recently developed bioinformatics sequence alignment tool, named BFAST, to the cloud environment. The MapReduce version of the BFAST tool will be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the MapReduce framework and the cloud-computing model in handling the intensive computations and management of the huge bioinformatics data.

A number of existing tools and technologies are utilized in this study to achieve an efficient transformation of the BFAST tool into the cloud environment. The implementation is mainly based on two core components; BFAST and MapReduce. BFAST is a software package for aligning next generation genomic reads against a target genome with a very high accuracy and reasonable speed. MapReduce general-purpose parallelization technology [in its open source implementation, Hadoop] appears to be particularly well adapted to the intensive computations and huge data storage tasks involved in the BFAST sequence alignment tool.

The MapReduce version of the BFAST tool is expected to offer better results than the original one in terms of maintaining good computational efficiency, accuracy, scalability, deployment and management efforts.

The study demonstrates how a general-purpose parallelization technology, i.e. MapReduce running on the cloud, can be tailored to tackle the class of bioinformatics problems with good performance and scalability, and, more importantly, how this technology could be the basis of a computational parallel platform for several problems in the context of bioinformatics. Although the effort of transforming existing bioinformatics algorithms from local compute infrastructure is not trivial, the speed and flexibility of cloud computing environments provide a substantial boost with manageable cost.

Background: Reliable high-speed data communication that supports multimedia application for both indoor and outdoor mobile users is a fundamental requirement for next generation wireless networks and requires a dense deployment of physically coexisting network architectures. Due to the limited spectrum availability, a novel interference-aware spectrum-sharing concept is introduced where networks that suffer from congested spectrums (secondary-networks) are allowed to share the spectrum with other networks with available spectrum (primary-networks) under the condition that limited interference occurs to primary networks.

Objective: Multiple-antenna and adaptive rate can be utilized as a power-efficient technique for improving the data rate of the secondary link while satisfying the interference constraint of the primary link by allowing the secondary user to adapt its transmitting antenna, power, and rate according to the channel state information.

Methods: Two adaptive schemes are proposed using multiple-antenna transmit diversity and adaptive modulation in order to increase the spectral-efficiency of the secondary link while maintaining minimum interference with the primary. Both the switching efficient scheme (SES) and bandwidth efficient scheme (BES) use the scan-and-wait combining antenna technique (SWC) where there is a secondary transmission only when a branch with an acceptable performance is found; else the data is buffered.

Results: In both these schemes the constellation size and selected transmit branch are determined to minimized the average number of switches and achieve the highest spectral efficiency given a minimum bit-error-rate (BER), fading conditions, and peak interference constraint. For delayed sensitive applications, two schemes using power control are used: SES-PC and BES-PC. In these schemes the secondary transmitter sends data using a nominal power level, which is optimized to minimize the average delay. Several numerical examples show that the BES scheme increases the capacity of the secondary link.

Conclusion: The SES and BES schemes reach high spectral efficiency and BER performance at the expense of an increased delay. The SES-PC and BESPC minimize the average delay, satisfy the BER, and maintain a high spectral efficiency. The proposed power optimization and power control processes minimize the delay and the dropping probability especially if we extend the presented work to a multiuser scenario.

Many data-intensive applications on the Web require integrating data from multiple sources (Web databases) at query time. Online sources may refer to the same real world entity in different ways and some may provide outdated or erroneous data. An important task is to recognize and merge the various references that refer to the same entity at query time. Almost all existing duplicate detection and fusion techniques work in the offline setting and, thus, do not meet the online constraint. There are at least two aspects that differentiate online duplicate detection and fusion from its offline counterpart. First, the latter assumes that the entire data is available, while the former cannot make such a hard assumption. Second, several iterations (query submissions) may be required to compute the “ideal” representation of an entity in the online setting.

We propose a general framework to address this problem: an interactive caching solution. A set of frequently requested records is cleaned off-line and cached for future references. Newly arriving records in response to a stream of queries are cleaned jointly with the records in the cache, presented to users and appended to the cache.

We introduce two online record linkage and fusion approaches: (i) a record-based and (ii) a graph-based. They chiefly differ in the way they organize data in the cache as well as computationally. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of the two techniques with real data from the Web. We couple their analysis with commonly used cache settings: static/dynamic, cache size and eviction policies.

The ability to efficiently extract useful information from volumes of data distributed across myriad networks is hindered by the latencies inherent to magnetic storage devices and computer networks. We propose overcoming these limitations by leveraging solid-state drive (SSD) and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technologies to process large streams of data directly at the storage sites.

Our proposed reconfigurable, active, solid-state drive (RASSD) platform consists of distributed nodes that couple SSDs with FPGAs. While SSDs store data, FPGAs implement processing elements that couple soft-core RISC processors with dynamically reconfigurable logic resources. The processors execute data-processing software drivelets, and the logic resources implement hardware for accelerating performance-critical operations. Executing appropriate drivelets and using matching hardware accelerators enables us to efficiently process streams of data stored across SSDs.

To manage the configuration of RASSD nodes and provide a transparent interface to applications, our platform also consists of distributed middleware software. Client local middleware (CLM) resides on client host machines to interpret application data processing requests, locate storage sites, and exchange data-processing requests and results with middleware servers (MWS). MWS connect to clusters of RASSD nodes and contain libraries of drivelets and accelerator configuration bit streams. An MWS loads appropriate drivelet and accelerator bit streams onto a RASSD node's FPGA, aggregates processed data, and returns it to a CLM.

To evaluate our platform, we implemented a simple system consisting of a host computer connected to a RASSD node over a peer-to-peer network. We ran a keyword search application on the host computer, which also provided middleware functionality. We then evaluated this platform under three configurations. In configuration C1, the RASSD node was only used to store data while all data was processed by the MWS running on the host computer. In configuration C2, the data was processed by a drivelet running on the RASSD node. Finally, in configuration C3, the data was processed both by a drivelet and a hardware accelerator.

Our experimental results show that C3 is 2x faster than C2, and 6x faster than C1. This demonstrates our platform's potential for enhancing the performance of data-intensive applications over current systems.

Cooperative communication relaying systems are gaining much interest because they can improve average link signal to nose ratio by replacing longer hops with multiple shorter hops. The method of relaying has been introduced to enable a source (i.e. mobile terminal) communicate with a target destination via a relaying (i.e. mobile terminal). Furthermore, multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems have been considered as powerful candidates for the fourth generation of wireless communication standards because they can achieve further performance improvements including an increase in the achievable spectral efficiency and the peak data rates (Multiplexing), and robustness against severe effects of fading (transmit beamforming). In this work, we consider hop-by-hop beamforming relaying system over Rayleigh fading channels. In wireless communication environments, it is well known understood that the performance of wireless networks can be limited by both fading and co-channel interference (CCI). In this work, the multiple antennas at each node of relaying systems can be used to adaptively modify the radiation pattern of the array to reduce the interference by placing nulls in the direction of the dominant interferers. In this paper, we investigate the effect of CCI on the performance of hop-by-hop beamforming relaying system. First, we derive exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and average symbol error rates. Moreover, we look into the high signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime and study the diversity order and coding gain achieved by the system.

Machine learning methods can be used to train automatic speech recognizers (ASR). When porting ASR to a new language, however, or to a new dialect of spoken Arabic, we often have too few labeled training data to allow learning of a high-precision ASR. It seems reasonable to think that unlabeled data, e.g., untranscribed television broadcasts, should be useful to train the ASR; human infants, for example, are able to learn the distinction between phonologically similar words after just one labeled training utterance. Unlabeled data tell us the marginal distribution of speech sounds, p(x), but do not tell us the association between labels and sounds, p(y|x). We propose that knowing the marginal is sufficient to rank-order all possible phoneme classification functions, before the learner has heard any labeled training examples at all. Knowing the marginal, the learner is able to compute the expected complexity (e.g., derivative of the expected log covering number) of every possible classifier function, and based on measures of complexity, it is possible to compute the expected mean-squared probable difference between training-corpus error and test-corpus error. Upon presentation of the first few labeled training examples, then, the learner simply chooses, from the rank-ordered list of possible phoneme classifiers, the first one that is reasonably compatible with the labeled examples. This talk will present formal proofs, experimental tests using stripped-down toy problems, and experimental results from English-language ASR; future work will test larger-scale implementations for ASR in the spoken dialects of Arabic.

Background: With the world's population projected to grow from the current 6.8 billion to around 9 billion by 2050, the resultant increase of megacities and the associated demands on public transport, there is an urgent imperative to understand the dynamics of crowded environments. Very dense crowds that exceed 3 people per square metre present many challenges for efficiently measuring quantities such as density and pedestrian trajectories. The Hajj and the associated minor Muslim pilgrimage of Umrah, present some of the most densely crowded human environments in the world, and thus present an excellent observational laboratory for the study of dense crowd dynamics. An accurate characterisation of such dense crowds cannot only improve existing models, but can also help to develop better intervention strategies for mitigating crowd disasters such as the Hajj 2006 Jamarat stampede that killed over 300 pilgrims. With Qatar set to be one of the cultural centres in the region, e.g. FIFA World Cup 2022, the proper control and management of large singular events is important for not only our safety but also our standing in the international stage.

Objectives: To use the data gathered from the Hajj to assess the dynamics of large dense crowds with a particular focus on crowd instabilities and pattern formation.

Methods: We will make use of advanced image processing and pattern recognition techniques (mathematical morphology, feature selection etc.) in assessing some of the bulk properties of crowds such as density and flow, as well as the finer details such as the ensemble of pedestrian trajectories. We are currently in the process of taking multiple wide-angle stereo videos at this year's Hajj, with our collaborators in Umm Al-Qurra University in Mecca. Multiple video capture of the same scene from different angles allows one to overcome the problem of occlusion in dense crowds.

Results: We will present our field study in the Hajj this year, where we took extensive high quality multiple camera video data. We will also present some of the techniques, which we will be using over the coming year in analyzing this large data set that we have now successfully collated.

Recent advances in imaging and communication have lead to the development of smart cameras that can operate autonomously and collaboratively to meet various application requirements. Networks of such cameras, called Smart Camera Networks (SCNs), have a range of applications in areas such as monitoring and surveillance, traffic management and health care. The self-configuring nature of cameras, by adjusting their pan, tilt and zoom (PTZ) settings, coupled with wireless connectivity differentiate them substantially from classical multi-camera surveillance networks.

One of the important problems in SCNs is: “How to configure cameras to obtain the best possible coverage of events happening within the area of interest?” As the scale of cameras grows from tens to hundreds of cameras, it is impractical to rely on humans to configure cameras to best track areas of interest. Thus, supporting autonomous configuration of cameras to maximize their collective coverage is a critical requirement in SCNs.

Our research first focuses on a simplified version of the problem, where the field-of-view (FoV) of a camera can be adjusted only by adjusting its pan in discrete manner. Even with such simplifications, solving the problem optimally is NP-hard. Thus, we propose centralized, distributed and semi-centralized heuristics that outperform the state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, the semi-centralized approach provides coverage accuracy close to the optimal, while reducing the communication latency by 97% and 74% compared to the centralized and distributed approaches, respectively.

Next, we consider the problem without FoV constraints; we allow FoVs to be adjusted in PTZ dimensions in continuous manner. While, PTZ configurations significantly increase the coverable area, the continuous adjustment nature eliminates any sub-optimality resulting from the discrete settings. However, supporting these features typically results in generating extremely large number of feasible FoVs per camera, out of which only one optimal FoV will be selected. We show that the problem of finding minimum feasible FoVs per camera is NP-hard. However, due to the geometric constraints introduced by the camera's FoV, the problem can be solved in polynomial time. Our proposed algorithm has polynomial-time worst-case complexity of O(n3).

User-localization and positioning systems have been a core challenge in the domain of context-aware pervasive systems and applications. GPS has been the de-facto standard for outdoor localization; however, geo-satellite signals upon which GPS rely, are inaccurate in indoor environments. Therefore, various indoor localization techniques based on triangulation, scene analysis, or proximity, have been introduced. The most prominent technologies over which these techniques are applied include WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID, Infrared, and UWB. Due to the ubiquitous deployment of access points, WiFi-based localization via triangulation has emerged to be among the most prominent indoor positioning solutions. A major deployment obstacle for such systems, however, is the high-energy consumption rates of Wifi adapters in mobile devices where energy is the most valuable resource.

We propose GreenLoc, an indoor green localization system that exploits sensors prevalent in today's smart-phones in order to dynamically adapt the frequency of location updates required. Significant energy gains can, therefore, be acquired when users are not mobile. For example, accelerometers can aid in detecting different user states such as walking, running or stopping. Based on these states, mobile devices can dynamically decide upon the appropriate update frequency. We accommodate various motion speeds by estimating the velocity of the device using the latest two location coordinates, and the time interval between these two-recorded locations. We have taken the first steps towards implementing GreenLoc, based on the infamous Ekahau system. We have also conducted preliminary tests utilizing the accelerometer, gravity, gyroscope, and light sensors residing on the HTC Nexus One and IPhone4 smart-phones.

To further save energy in typical indoor environments, such as malls, schools, and airports, GreenLoc exploits people's proximity when moving in groups. Devices within short-range of each other do not necessarily require that they each be individually tracked. Therefore, GreenLoc detects and clusters users moving together and elects a reference node (RN) based on device energy levels and needs. The elected RN will then be tracked via triangulation while other nodes in the group will be tracked based on the RN's location using Bluetooth. Our initial analysis demonstrates very promising results with this system.

Cloud computing revolutionizes the way large amounts of data are processed and offers a compelling paradigm to organizations. An increasing number of data-intensive scientific applications are being ported to cloud environments such as virtualized clusters, in order to take advantage of increased cost-efficiency, flexibility, scalability, improved hardware utilization and reduced carbon footprint, among others.

However, due to the complexity of the application execution environment, routine tasks such as monitoring, performance analysis and debugging of applications deployed on the cloud become cumbersome and complex. These tasks often require close interaction and inspection of multiple layers in the application and system software stack. For example, when analyzing a distributed application that has been provisioned on a cluster of virtual machines, a researcher might need to monitor the execution of his program on the VMs, or the availability of physical resources to the VMs. This would require the researcher to use different sets of tools to collect and analyze performance data from each level.

Otus is a tool that enables resource attribution in clusters and currently reports only the virtual resource utilization and not the physical resource utilization on virtualized clusters. This is insufficient to fully understand application behavior on a cloud platform; it would fail to account for the state of the physical infrastructure, its availability or the variation in load by other VMs on the same physical host, for example.

We are extending Otus to collect metrics from multiple layers, starting with the Hypervisor. Otus can now collect information from both the VM level as well as the Hypervisor level; and this information is collected in an OpenTSDB database, which is scalable to large clusters. A web-based application allows the researcher to selectively visualize these metrics in real-time or for a particular time range in the past.

We have tested our multi-layered monitoring technique on several Hadoop Mapreduce applications and clearly identified the causes of several performance problems that would otherwise not be clear using existing methods. Apart from helping researchers understand application needs, our technique could also help accelerate the development and testing of new platforms for cloud researchers.

SmartReader is a general-purpose “reading appliance” being implemented at Carnegie Mellon University (Qatar and Pittsburgh) - building upon an earlier prototype version. It is an artificial intelligence system that employs advanced language processing technologies and can interact with the reader and respond to queries about the content, words and sentences in a text. We expect it to be used by students in Qatar and elsewhere to help improve their comprehension of English text. SmartReader is motivated by the observation that text is still the predominant medium for learning especially at the advanced level and that text, being ``bland’’, is hardly a conducive and motivating medium for learning, especially when one does not have access to tools that enable one get over language roadblocks, ranging from unknown words to unrecognized and forgotten names, to hard-to-understand sentences. SmartReader strives to make reading (English) textual material, an “active” and an “interactive” process with the user interacting with the text using anytime-anywhere contextually-guided query mechanism based-on contextual user intent recognition. With SmartReader, a user can -inquire about the contextually correct meaning or synonyms of a word or idiomatic and multi-word constructions, -select a person's name, and then get an immediate ``flashback’’ to the first (or the last) time the person was encountered in text to remind herself the details of the person, -extract a summary of a section to remember important aspects of the content at the point she left off, and continue reading with a significantly refreshed context, -select a sentence that she may not be able to understand fully and ask SmartReader to break it down, simplify or paraphrase to comprehend it better. -test her comprehension of the text in a page or a chapter, by asking SmartReader to dynamically generate quizzes and answering them. -ask questions about the content of the text and get answers in addition to many other functions. SmartReader is being implemented as a multi-platform (tablet/PC) client-server system using HTML5 technology, with Unstructured Information Management Architecture -UIMA technology (used recently in IBM's Watson Q/A system in the Jeopardy Challenge) as the underlying language processing framework.

In general, scientific applications require different types of computing resources based on the application's behavior and needs. For example, page indexing in an Arabic search engine requires sufficient network bandwidth to process millions of web pages while seismic modeling is CPU and graphics intensive for real-time fluid analysis and 3D visualization. As a potential solution, cloud computing, with its elastic, on-demand and pay-as-you-go model, can offer a variety of virtualized compute resources to satisfy the demands of various scientific applications. Currently, deploying scientific applications onto large-scale virtualized cloud computing platforms is based on a random mapping or some rule-of-thumb developed through past experience. Such provisioning and scheduling techniques cause overload or inefficient use of the shared underlying computing resources, while delivering little to no satisfactory performance guarantees. Virtualization, a core enabling technology in cloud computing, enables the coveted flexibility and elasticity yet it introduces several difficulties with resource mapping for scientific applications.

In order to enable informed provisioning, scheduling and perform optimizations on cloud infrastructures while running scientific workloads, we propose the utilization of a profiling technique to characterize the resource need and behavior of such applications. Our approach provides a framework to characterize scientific applications based on their resource capacity needs, communication patterns, bandwidth needs, sensitivity to latency, and degree of parallelism. Although the programming model could significantly affect these parameters, we focus this initial work on characterizing applications developed using the MapReduce and Dryad programming models. We profile several applications, while varying the cloud configurations and scale of resources in order to study the particular resource needs, behavior and identify potential resources that limit performance. A manual and iterative process using a variety of representative input data sets is necessary to reach informative conclusions about the major characteristics of an application's resource needs and behavior. Using this information, we provision and configure a cloud infrastructure, given the available resources, to best target the given application. In this preliminary work, we show experimental results across a variety of applications and highlight the merit in precise application characterization in order to efficiently utilize the resources available across different applications.

Although Computerized Numerical Controlled (CNC) machines are currently regarded as the heart of machining workshops they are still suffering from machine blindness, hence, they cannot automatically judge the performance of applied machining parameters or monitor tool wear. Therefore, parts produced on these machines may not be as precise as expected. In this research an innovative system is developed and successfully tested to improve the performance of CNC machines. The system utilizes twin-camera computer vision system. This vision system is integrated with the CNC machine controller to facilitate on-line monitoring and assessment of machined surfaces. Outcome from the monitoring and assessment task of is used to real-time control of the applied machining parameters by a developed decision making subsystem which automatically decides whether to keep or alter the employed machining parameters or to apply tool change. To facilitate the integration of computer vision with CNC machines a comprehensive system is developed to tackle a number of pinpointed issues that obstruct such integration including scene visibility issue (e.g. effects of coolant and cut chips as well as camera mounting and lighting), effects of machine vibration on the quality of obtained roughness measurement, selection of a the most proper roughness parameter to be employed, and assessment of machining parameters effects on acquired roughness measurement. Two system rigs employing different models of CNC machines are practically developed and employed in the conducted tests to beneficially generalize the findings. Two cameras are mounted on the machine spindle of each of the two employed CNC machines to provide valid image data according to the cutting direction. Proper selection and activation of relative camera is achieved automatically by the developed system which analyze the most recent conducted tool path movement to decide on which camera is to be activated. In order to assess the machining surface quality and cutting tool status, image data are processed to evaluate resulting tool imprints on the machined surface. An indicating parameter to assess resulting tool imprints is proposed and used. The overall results show the validity of the approach and encourage further development to realize wider scale applications of vision-based-CNC machines.

Cooperative communications has gained a lot of attention in the research community recently. This was possible due to the fact that the broadcast nature of wireless networks, which was earlier considered a drawback, can now be used to provide spatial diversity to increase throughput, reduce energy consumption and provide network resilience. The main drawback of cooperative communication is that it requires more bandwidth compared to traditional communication networks. Decode and Forward (DF) is one of the cooperative communications forwarding strategy where the relay nodes first decodes the data and then retransmit it to the destination. DF requires advanced techniques, which can be used at the intermediate relay nodes to improve spectrum utilization.

Some well-known techniques for spectrum efficiency are Network Coding (NC) and Hierarchical Modulation (HM). In NC technique, nodes in a network are capable of combining packets for a transmission, thus reducing number of transmissions. HM is a technique which allows transmission of multiple data streams simultaneously. Both HM and NC are useful techniques for spectral efficiency.

In this work, we evaluate the performance of a joint HM and NC scheme for two-way relay networks. The relaying is based on the signal-to-noise (SNR) threshold at relay. In particular, a two way cooperative network with two sources and one relay is considered as shown in fig 1. Two different protection classes are modulated by a hierarchical 4/16 - Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) constellation at the source. Based on the instantaneous received SNR at the relay, the relay decides to retransmit both classes by using a hierarchical 4/16 - QAM constellation, or the more-protection class by using a Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) constellation, or remains silent. These thresholds at the relay give rise to multiple transmission scenarios in a two-way cooperative network. Simulation results are provided to verify the analysis.

A service software is a self-contained, modular application deployed over standard computing platforms, and readily accessible by users within or across organizational boundaries using Internet. For businesses to open up their applications for the interaction with other service software, a fundamental requirement is that there has to be sufficient choices for security provisions allowing service consumers to select and verify the actual security assurances of services. In this context, the specific research challenge is how we could design service software focusing on the consumer's specific security requirements, and provide assurances to those security needs. Clearly, the security requirements vary from consumers to consumers. This work outlines a framework focusing on the selection of service software consistent with the security requirements of consumers, and compatibility checking of the assurances provided by services. We use profile-based compatibility analysis techniques to form an essential building block towards assuring security of service software.

In our research, we envision a security profile based compatibility checking that focuses more on automatic analysis of security compatibility using formal analysis techniques of security properties of software services. Our approach is based on three main building blocks: reflection of security assurances; selection of preferred assurances; and checking of security compatibility. Clearly, our vision and research for service security based on profile based compatibility analysis will form an essential building block towards realizing the full potential of service oriented computing. We foresee that the provision of the proposed scheme for service security profiling and compatibility analysis will significantly advance the state of practice in service oriented computing. At the same time, its development represents a new and highly challenging research target in the area.

This work is of great significance to the development of future software systems that facilitate security-aware cross-organizational business activities. The envisioned capability to integrate service software across-organizational boundaries that meets security requirements of all parties involved represents a significant technological advance in enabling practical business-to-business computing, leading to new business opportunities. At the same time, the approach will make significant scientific advancement in understanding the problem of application-level system security in a service oriented computing context.

The objective of this paper is to present the edutainment learning games that we are developing for Qatari children with moderate intellectual disability. These games will help them to learn effectively in funny and enjoyable ways. We use multimedia technology merged with intelligent algorithms to guide the children in play. As the number of children with intellectual disability is increasing, an early intervention to teach them properly using information technology is very important. Few research projects on disability are being conducted in the Arab world however, and these projects are still not enough to respond to the real needs of the disabled and achieve satisfactory outcomes. Developing edutainment games for children with intellectual disability is a very challenging task. First, it requires content developed by specialized instructors. Second, the interface design of the games must be presented clearly and be easy to interact with. Third, the games must run slowly, in order to give the children some time to think and interact. Fourth, regardless of the results, the game must allow a minimum level of general satisfaction, to avoid depressing the children. Fifth, the game must make maximum use of multimedia elements to draw the attention of the children. We show some multimedia applications for children with different disabilities, which were developed in Qatar University (enhancing mathematics skills with symbolic gift reward in case of guessing the answer). This feature motivated the children to play the game several times in the day. The applications also used some videos to illustrate the game before they play it. The purpose of the second multimedia application is to test the children's memory. The application uses different multimedia elements to present different games, which requires deep concentration in order to guess the answer. These games helped the children develop a strong sense of self-confidence. Learning puzzles that we have developed were based on intelligent algorithms to avoid cycling and which allow the children to reach a solution. Two different approaches were used: Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search.

With the emergence of cloud computing, providing safe data outsourcing has become an active topic. Several regulations have been issued to foresee that individual and corporate information would be kept private in a cloud computing environment. To guarantee that these regulations are fully maintained, the research community proposed new privacy constraints such as k-anonymity, l-diversity and t-closeness. These constraints are based on generalization which, transforms identifying attribute values into a general form and partitions to eliminate possible linking attacks. Despite their efficiency, generalization techniques affect severely the quality of outsourced data and their correlation. To cope with such defects, Anatomy has been proposed. Anatomy releases quasi-identifiers values and sensitive values into separate tables which, essentially preserve privacy and at the same time capture large amount of data correlation. However, there are situations where data correlation could lead to an unintended leak of information. In this example, if an adversary knows that patient Roan (P1) takes a regular drug, the join of Prescription (QIT) and Prescription (SNT) on the attribute GID leads to the association of RetinoicAcid to patient P1 due to correlation.

In this paper, we present a study to counter privacy violation due to data correlation and at the same time improve aggregate analysis. We show that privacy requirements affect table decomposition based on what we call correlation dependencies. We propose a safe grouping principle to ensure that correlated values are grouped together in unique partitions that obey to l-diversity and at the same time preserve the correlation. An optimization strategy is designed as well to reduce the number of anonymized tuples. Finally, we extended the UTD Anonymization Toolbox to implement the proposed algorithm and demonstrate its efficiency.

The community with Hearing or Speaking Disabilities represents a significant component of the society that needs to be well integrated in order to foster great advancements through leveraging all contributions of every member in the society. When those people cannot read lips they usually need interpreters to help them communicate with people who do not know sign language, and they also need an interpreter when they use phones, because the communication will not be done easily if they are not using special aiding devices, like a Relay Service or Instant Messaging (IM). As the number of people with hearing and speaking disabilities is increasing significantly; building bridges of communications between deaf and hearing community is essential, to deepen the mutual cooperation in all aspects of life. The problem could be summarized in one question: How to construct this bridge to allow people with hearing and speaking difficulties communicate?

This project suggests an innovative framework that contributes to the efficient integration of people with hearing disabilities with the society by using wireless communication and mobile technology. This project is completely operator independent unlike the existing solutions (Captel and Relay Service), it depends on an extremely powerful Automatic Speech Recognition and Processing Server (ASRPS) that can process speech and transform it into text. Independent means, it recognizes the voice regardless of the speaker and the characteristics of his/ her voice. On the other side there will be a Text To Speech (TTS) engine, which will take the text sent to the application server and transmit it as speech. The second aim of the project is to develop an iPhone/iPad application for the hearing impaired. The application facilitates the reading of the received text by converting it into sign language animations, which are constructed from a database; we are currently using American Sign Language for its simplicity. Nevertheless, the application can be further developed in other languages like Arabic sign language and British sign language. The application also assists the writing process by developing a customized user interface for the deaf to communicate efficiently with others that includes a customized keyboard.

Information Systems (IS) is a discipline that has its roots in the field of organizational development. Information Technology (IT) is a primary tool that has been used by IS to support the aim of developing organisations. However, IT has focused on supporting two main areas in organisations to help them become better at achieving their goals.These two areas are: operational and strategic. Little research has been devised to support the Human (workforce) for the aim of improving organization’s abilities to achieve their goals. In IS the Socio-Technical Theory is one theory that researches approaches to improve employees' satisfaction for the sake of better work productivity and business value. This theory is based on the idea of achieving harmonious integration of different subsystems in an organization (social, technical and environmental subsystems).

The aim of this research is to find out if IT can be used to improve the capability and motivation of the workforce in organisations so that these organizations can better achieve their goals.

This research is an applied study with reference to the Qatar National Vision 2030(QNV2030) Human Pillar. Using grounded theory (GTH) research methodology, the research characterized the main factors that affect capability and motivation of the Qatari workforce. These findings were used to develop the theoretical model. This model identifies core factors, gives a description of each factor and explains interactions between them. The theoretical model was then transformed into an IT system consisting of a number of IT tools, which was then tested in different organizations in Qatar. The test was to evaluate its effectiveness in improving the capabilities and motivation of Qatari workforce and to explore its effectiveness in helping these organizations better achieve their goals.

The research concluded that the developed IT system based on the theoretical model can help in improving motivation and capability of a workforce providing a defined set of organizational and leadership qualities exist within the organisation.

Plastic/organic /polymer photovoltaic solar cells are fourth generation cells however the efficiency, thermal stability and cost of fourth generation solar cells are still not sufficient to replace conventional solar cells. Hybrid solar cells have been one of the alternate technologies to harness solar power into electrical power to overcome the high cost of conventional solar cells. This review paper has focused on the concept of hybrid solar cells with the combination of organic/polymer materials, blended with inorganic semiconducting materials. The paper presents the importance of nanoscale materials and its shape and size, nanotubes, nanowire, nanocrystal, which can increase the efficiency of the solar cells. The study shows that nanomaterials have immense potential and application of nanomaterials (inorganic/organic/polymer) can improve the performance of photovoltaic solar cells. Tuning of nanomaterials increase the functionality, band gap, optical absorption and shape of the materials, in multiple orders compared to micro scale materials. Hybrid solar cells have unique properties of inorganic semiconductors along with the film forming properties of conjugated polymers. Hybrid materials have great potential because of their unique properties and are showing great results at the preliminary stages of research. The advantage of organic/polymer is easy processing; roll to roll production, lighter weight, flexible shape and size of the solar cells. Application of nanotechnology in hybrid solar cells has opened the door to manufacturing of a new class of high performance devices.

This research work is in line with the State of Qatar's aspiration on becoming the “gas capital of the world”, as it focuses on developing cost effective Gas-to- Liquid (GTL) technologies via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS). The objective of our present research activities is developing a novel approach to the FTS reactor design through controlling the thermo-physical characteristics of the reaction media by the introduction of a supercritical solvent.

The research is facilitated by QNRF through the flagship National Priorities Research Program, highlighting the importance of the subject matter to Qatar. It is a multidisciplinary consortium comprising of highly specialized teams of foremost scientists in their fields from four universities.

FTS is the focal process in which natural gas is converted to ultra-clean liquid based fuels; it is a highly complex chemical reaction where synthesis gas (a mixture of Hydrogen & Carbon Monoxide) enters the reactor and propagates to various hydrocarbons over a metallic based catalyst. Many factors impede the current commercial FTS technologies, chiefly transport and thermal limitations due to the nature of the phase of operation (either liquid or gas phase classically). Interestingly, the most advanced FTS technologies that employ either the liquid phase or gas phase are currently in operation in Qatar (Shell's Pearl project and Sasol's Oryx GTL plant).

This project is concerned with the design of an FTS reactor to be operated under supercritical fluid conditions in order to leverage certain advantages over the aforementioned commercial technologies. The conception of designing this novel reactor is based on phase behavior and kinetic studies of the non-ideal SCF media in addition to a series of process integration and optimization studies coupled with the development of sophisticated dynamic control systems. These results are currently under use at TAMUQ to build a bench-scale reactor to verify simulation studies.

To date, our collective research has yielded 8 peer-reviewed publications, more than 8 conference papers and proceedings, as well as numerous presentations in international conferences. It is noteworthy to mention that an advisory board composed of experts from the world leading energy companies follows the progress of this project toward its ultimate goal.