Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2012 Issue 1

Given the success of outdoor tracking via GPS and the rise of real-time context-aware services, users will soon rely on applications that require higher granularity indoor localization. This need is further manifested in countries like Qatar, where various social and business activities occur indoors. Wi-Fi-based indoor localization is one of the most researched techniques due to its ubiquitous deployment and acceptable accur Read More

Qatar is currently building one of the largest research infrastructures in the Middle East. In this orientation, Qatar foundation has constructed a number of universities and institutes composed of highly qualified researchers. In particular, QCRI institute is forming a scientific computing multidisciplinary group with a special interest in machine learning, data mining and bioinformatics. We are now able to address the com Read More

Background: Scheduling aircrafts on single or multiple runways is an important and difficult problem. This problem involves how aircrafts are sequenced on a runway and how they are assigned to runways has a significant impact on the utilization of the runways as well as on meeting the landing and departure target times. Most of the literature focuses on landing operations on a single runway as it is an easier problem to Read More

Overlaid cellular technology has been considered as a promising candidate to enhance the capacity and extend the coverage of cellular networks, particularly indoors. The deployment of small cells (e.g. femtocells and/or picocells) in an overlaid setup is expected to reduce the operational power and to function satisfactorily with the existing cellular architecture. Among the possible deployments of small-cell access points is Read More

Given the clear impact that mobility has on economical and social development, the continuous increase in the number of vehicles coupled with the increase in mobility behavior of people are creating new problems and challenges that need to be holistically addressed to ensure safe, sustainable, efficient and environmentally friendly mobility systems. Cooperative Intelligent Transportations Systems (ITS) allow the transportation inf Read More

Background and Objective: 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 netwo Read More

In this work we attempt to understand the visual accents in Arabic facial expressions and create culture-specific facial expressions for a female multi-lingual, cross-cultural robot. This study will enable the investigation of the effect of creating such expressions on the quality of the human-robot interaction. Our work is twofold: we first identify the existence of accent variation in facial expressions across cultures, then we val Read More

Background: This trans-disciplinary study presents the initial outcomes of a key study undertaken to explore the role of augmented reality and motion detecting technologies in the context of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) for museums-related environments. Initial prototypes are in the form of an interactive infrared camera based application for children to engage with an Aboriginal puppet, and Arabic calligraphic writin Read More

Background: Nowadays, by considering the important advances in multimedia and networks including telemedicine applications, the amount of information to store and/or transmit has dramatically increased over time. To overcome the limitations of transmission channels or storage systems, data compression is considered a useful tool. In general, data compression addresses the problem of reducing the amount of Read More