Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2012 Issue 1

The advent of standards such as IEEE 11073 for device connectivity, Health Level Seven (HL7) etc., provide an assimilating platform for medical devices and seamless dataflow among modern health information systems (HIS). However, to date, these standards are either not widely accepted or lack the support of 'on-the-fly' formation of HIS in a disaster zone. In a situation where hybrid medical (standard compliant and the ot Read More

Automatic Information Extraction (IE) is a challenging task because it involves experts' skills and requires well developed Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms. Moreover, IE is domain dependent and context sensitive. In this research, we present a general learning approach that may be applied for different types of events. As a matter of fact, we observed that even if a natural language text containing a targ Read More

Background and Objectives: Multimedia tutorials are often useful for children with disabilities as they are better able to understand new concepts with the use of lessons that engage their senses. These tutorials should include images, sounds and videos. We propose a system to dynamically generate multimedia tutorials that can easily be customized by the instructor, with the use of domain specific information extraction. Me Read More

Spectrum sharing systems have been recently introduced to alleviate the problem of spectrum scarcity by allowing secondary unlicensed networks to share the spectrum with primary licensed networks under acceptable interference levels to the primary users. In this work, we develop interference-aware random beam selection schemes that provide enhanced performance for the secondary network under the conditio Read More

Background and Objectives: In dysprosodic speech, the prosody does not match the expected intonation pattern and can result in robotic-like speech, with each syllable produced with equal stress. These errors are manifested through inconsistent lexical stress as measured by perceptual judgments and/or acoustic variables. Lexical stress is produced through variations in syllable duration, peak intensity and fundamental fr Read More

Long Term Evolution (LTE) supports closed-loop MIMO techniques to improve its performance; however, in order to exploit the multiuser MIMO channel capabilities, the design of an efficient MAC scheme that supports MU-MIMO is essential and is still an open issue in the literature. This work proposes a novel, energy-efficient MAC scheme for LTE, which aims to achieve simultaneous downlink transmissions to multiple users th Read More

An important objective of modeling biological phenomena is to develop therapeutic intervention strategies to move an undesirable state of a diseased network towards a more desirable one. Such transitions can be achieved by the use of drugs to act on some genes/metabolites that affect the undesirable behavior. Biological phenomena are complex processes with nonlinear dynamics that cannot be perfectly described by Read More

In this paper we propose a hybrid approach to align single words, compound words and idiomatic expressions from English-Arabic parallel corpora. The objective is to develop, improve and maintain automatically translation lexicons. This approach combines linguistic and statistical information in order to improve word alignment results. The linguistic improvements taken into account refer to the use of an existing bilingual lexicon, Read More

Background and Objectives As e-commerce functions in a more perplex and conjoint environment than traditional businesses, a higher degree of trust is required between the users and online businesses. Uncertainties inherent to the current e-commerce environment give rise to a lack of trust and reliability in e-commerce partnerships, thereby reducing confidence and creating barriers to trade. The reason why most user Read More