Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2012 Issue 1

Background and Objectives: There is high requirement of face and signature based multimodal biometric systems in various areas, such as banking, biometric systems and secured mobile phone operating systems. Few studies have been carried out in this area to enhance the performance of identification and authentication based on the fusion of those modalities. In multimodal biometric systems, the most co Read More

Practical algorithms have been proposed to efficiently recompute the logical consequences of a Datalog program after a new fact has been asserted or retracted. This is essential in a dynamic setting where facts are frequently added and removed. Yet while assertion is logically well understood as incremental inference, the monotonic nature of traditional first-order logic is ill-suited to model retraction. As such, the tr Read More

Cloud computing has become a very popular platform to deploy data-intensive scientific applications, but this process faces its own set of challenges. Given the complexity of the application execution environment, routine tasks on the cloud such as monitoring, performance analysis, and debugging of applications become tedious and complex. These routine tasks often require close interaction and inspection of multip Read More

The MapReduce programming model is a widely accepted solution to address the rapid growth of the so-called big-data processing demands. Various MapReduce applications with a huge volume of input data can run on an elastic compute cloud composed of many computing instances. This elastic compute cloud is best represented by a virtual cluster, such as Amazon EC2. Performance prediction of MapReduce applicati Read More

In this paper, we consider a spectrum sharing network with two-way relaying and multiuser diversity. More specifically, one secondary transmitter with the best channel quality is selected and splits its partial power to relay its received signals to the primary users by using the amplify-and-forward relaying protocol. We derive a tight approximation for the resulting outage probability. Based on this formula, the performance Read More

Power Electronics converters are finding growing applications in industries and house hold devices. The growing automation in industrial applications needs highly complex power electronics systems to process the electric power. The controls of power electronic converters are still posing challenges due to their required precision. Several control strategies are developed and reported in the literature including Pulse Read More

Driven by the increasing and successful prevalence of MapReduce as an analytics engine on the cloud, this work characterizes the Map phase in Hadoop MapReduce to guide its configuration and improve overall performance. MapReduce is one of the most effective realizations of large-scale data-intensive cloud computing platforms. Hadoop is an open source implementation of MapReduce and is currently enjoying wide popul Read More

Background: According to the Qatar National Vision 2030, Qatar residents are encouraged to implement information and communication technology (ICT) initiatives in government, business, and education in pursuit of a knowledge-based society that embraces innovation, entrepreneurship, and excellence in education. This research project, which is funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) unde Read More

Qatar is now accumulating important expertise in biomedical data analytics. At QCRI, we are interested in providing for biomedical researchers based on their computational needs and in developing tools for data analytics in biomedical research. When computers extract patterns and classifiers from a body, they are used to predict new data that helps in defining a prior threat or disease. One non-invasive powerful tec Read More

Advances in wireless communications technologies (e.g., 3G, 4G and beyond) entail demands for higher data rates. A well-known popular solution to fulfill this requirement was to allocate additional bandwidth, which unfortunately is not anymore viable due to radio-frequency (RF) spectrum scarcity. Nonetheless, spectrum measurements around the globe have revealed the fact that the available spectrum is under-utilized. O Read More