Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2012 Issue 1

Automated essay scoring is a research field which is continuously gaining popularity. Grading essays by hand is expensive and time consuming, automated scoring systems can yield fast, effective and affordable solutions that would make it possible to grade essays and other sophisticated testing tools. This study has been conducted on a dataset of thousands of English essay sets belonging to eight different categories provi Read More

The accurate design of chemical processes depends on the availability of models to predict the physical properties of the materials being processed. Thermodynamic properties such as enthalpies, entropies, and fugacities are particularly important in this context. Most of the models to evaluate them have adjustable parameters, fitted to give the best possible representation of the experimental data available for a given Read More

Extracting named entities is an important step for information extraction from a text, based on a given ontology. Dealing with Arabic language invokes an additional number of challenges compared to English, French and other languages within similar families. The major difficulties involve complex morphological systems, no capitalization, and no standardization of Arabic writing. The Arabic language has a rich and complex Read More

Our aim is to develop a culturally aware robot capable of communicating with people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and performing competently in a multi-lingual, cross-cultural context. Our test bed is a female robot receptionist, named Hala, deployed at the reception area in Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. Hala answers questions in Arabic and English about people, locations of offices, cl Read More

Background and Objective: The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) regulates physiologic processes autonomously through the sympathetic (SNS) and parasympathetic systems (PNS) with both working in balance e.g. sympathetic input accelerates heart rate and prepares for emergencies while the parasympathetic slows the heart rate and relaxes the body. Stress can lead to imbalances in these two systems which can har Read More

Stereo vision is a common sensing technique for mobile robots and is becoming more broadly used in automotive, industrial, entertainment, and consumer products. The quality of range data from a stereo system is highly dependent on the intrinsic and extrinsic calibration of the sensor head. Unfortunately, for deployed systems, drift in extrinsic calibration is nearly unavoidable. Thermal variation and cycling combined with sho Read More

In this paper, we consider a distributed beamforming scheme (DBF) in a spectrum sharing system where multiple secondary users share the spectrum with the licensed primary users under an interference temperature constraint. We assume that DBF is applied at the secondary users. We first consider optimal beamforming and compare it with the user selection scheme in terms of the outage probability and bit-error-rate Read More

Background & Objectives: The Hajj and minor Muslim pilgrimage of Umrah, present some of the most densely crowded human environments in the world, and thus offer an excellent testbed for the study of dense crowd dynamics. Accurate characterisation of such crowds is crucial to improve simulations that are ubiquitously applied to crowded environments such as train stations, and which require a high degree of detailed pa Read More

Fitting an analytic function to the two-dimensional surface brightness profile of a galaxy provides a powerful method of quantifying its internal structure. The resulting parameters reveal the size, shape and luminosity of the galaxy and its separate structural components (e.g., disk and bulge). Current galaxy fitting softwares packages consider only a single waveband image at a time. However, variations in stellar popula Read More

Background & Objectives: Cognitive radios (CRs) strive to utilize the white holes in the radio frequency (RF) spectrum in an opportunistic manner. Because interference is an inherent and a very critical design parameter for all sorts of wireless communication systems, many of the recently emerging wireless technologies prefer smaller size coverage with reduced transmit power in order to decrease interference. Prominent Read More

This research is aimed at evaluating the usability of notational systems that are used for specifying programs. We provide a conceptual analysis of the development of constraint diagrams (CD) as a diagrammatic notation which developed to support program specification. A detailed analysis of multi-case comparisons of formal languages and graphical systems for expressing logic and program constructs was conducted in order Read More

Under the scenario of an underlay cognitive radio network, we introduce the concept of minimum-selection maximum ratio transmission (MS-MRT). Inspired by the mode of operation of the minimum-selection generalized selection combining (MS-GSC) technique, the main idea behind MS-MRT is to present an adaptive variation of the existing maximum ratio transmission (MRT) technique. While in the MRT scheme, all the transmit Read More

Background and Objectives: A new generation of software emerged with mobile devices, cloud computing and the web. New usages come with new security threats, and a new generation of malware (malicious software) is emerging as well. Recent security reports show that these malware are on the increase. The goal of this project is to evaluate the risk of exposure to malware in popular app ecosystems such as Apple iOS, Read More

Background and Objectives: The target of this work is to construct a mathematical model to help resolve aircraft scheduling over multiple runways. This problem is considered a hard topic in transportation research due to the constantly increasing aviation traffic volume around the world. Surprisingly, although there exists an impressive amount of literature for the landing and arrival cases, there is no proposed exact soluti Read More

Two significant identities-de Bruijn and Stein-were independently studied in information theory and statistics. De Bruijn identity shows a connection between two fundamental concepts in information theory and signal processing: differential entropy and Fisher information. On the other hand, Stein identity represents a relationship between the expectation of a function and its first-order derivative. Due to their several applicati Read More

Having multiple users gives rise to multi-user diversity which can be exploited to give good quality-of-service to each user in the network and also increase the overall capacity of the network. In a spectrum-sharing setting, the multi-user diversity can be exploited; however, this is different from the traditional multi-user case because of the interference power constraints imposed on the secondary users. In this work, we consider Read More

With the advent of ultra high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies used in Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) machines, we are facing a daunting new era in petabyte scale bioinformatics data. The enormous amounts of data produced by NGS machines lead to storage, scalability, and performance challenges. At the same time, cloud computing architectures are rapidly emerging as robust and economical solutions to h Read More

Background and Objectives: In this work, we explore the implementation of the binary consensus algorithm in wireless sensor networks. Binary consensus is used to allow a collection of distributed entities to reach consensus regarding the answer to a binary question. Existing work on the algorithm focuses on simulation of the algorithm under the assumption of a fully connected network topology and unlimited messaging Read More

Water-related problems are increasingly recognized as one of the most immediate and serious environmental threats to mankind. In particular, all the GCC countries being located in an arid region, suffer from lack of natural freshwater resources. Groundwater is the major source of water for irrigation in these countries. The groundwater aquifers contain either fresh or brackish waters. In countries like Kuwait and Qatar the gr Read More

In a first ever joint venture initiative, Qatar Petroleum has joined forces with Total in an effort to improve acid stimulation programs. Acid stimulation in carbonates can greatly increase well productivity. Near-wellbore impairment or formation damage is typically analysed by a term called skin factor. It is this 'skin' that is removed during an acidizing operation in a well. Typically, reducing the skin factor by a factor of 5 Read More

Background: The coral ecosystem in Qatar is very important as it provides a foundation habitat for many aquatic species. An extensive two-year field study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) fluorometry in monitoring the health of sensitive ecosystems such as coral reefs along the coast of Qatar. The study demonstrated that PAM fluorometry can provide reliable and objecti Read More

In the present work, we reported the performance of the gas sensor based on polyaniline-polyvinyl alcohol (PANI-PVA) thin-film to develop a usable sensor. The PANI-PVA were doped with camphorsulphonic acid (CSA), naphtalenesulfonic acid (NSA), dodecyl benzene sulfonic acid (DBSA) and p-toluene sulfonic acid (PTSA). CSA doped PANI nanocomposite sensors were fabricated on glass substrates by dripping and their gas sens Read More

Qatar is the world leader in fuel production from gas-to-liquid (GTL) technology and home of the largest GTL plant in the world (Pearl GTL, a joint development by Qatar Petroleum and Shell). In the GTL process natural gas is converted into liquid fuels and waxes. Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) is the key part of that process. FTS is a heterogeneously catalyzed reaction in which a mixture of CO and H₂ is converted into a wide ran Read More

With sponsorship from Qatar Science and Technology Park to support Qatar Airways' vision as a world leader in alternative fuels, our research team started work in this field in 2009 as part of a unique academia-industry collaboration model. The undergraduate student researchers are funded by Qatar National Research Fund and play a major role in this project, participating in all its experimental, computational, and theoretical p Read More

We implement a novel and accurate discrete fracture (DF) method to simulate fracture-matrix flow in geologically representative networks. The aim of the work is to study the interplay of viscous, capillarity and buoyancy-controlled displacement. We eliminate the smearing effect created by combining fracture and matrix control volumes in current finite element approaches that average fluid properties (saturation, density, e Read More

Addressing challenges in design of effective air quality (AQ) monitoring network is important to ensure quality and representativeness of collected AQ data. Ideal locations for a network of fixed AQ stations are difficult to determine in Doha owing to the unavailability of existing AQ data, and uncertainties associated with the AQ site representation. This paper is intended to demonstrate the use of an emerging nano- technolog Read More

Soil plays an important role in life, especially in the cycling and supply of nutrients and water. Soil degradation is a serious global problem. It is caused by improper use of soil for different human activities. Soil degradation can lead to a significant decline in the productivity of agricultural lands. On a global scale, the annual loss of 75 billion tons of soil (mostly through desertification and soil erosion) costs the world about U Read More

A simplified mathematical model was developed to describe the performance of a submerged membrane sequencing batch reactor for the treatment of synthetic greywater. The greywater was characterised by low soluble carbon and relatively high nitrogen content. The developed mathematical model describes volatile suspended solids (VSS), chemical oxygen demand (COD), dissolved oxygen (DO) , NH₃, NO₂, and Read More

Polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell technology is one of the most promising alternative energy systems for an environmentally friendly, sustainable energy economy. Among the various types of fuel cells, PEM fuel cells are expected to be a dominant technology in the near future because they can operate with various types of energy carriers including hydrogen, ethanol, and methanol, run at relatively low temper Read More

Synthesis of super/hydrophobic solid surfaces is an active area of research in recent years because it forms the basis for multidisciplinary applications such as agricultural, environmental, and biological processes, such as the prevention of the adhesion of dust to antennas and windows, self-cleaning traffic indicators, waterproof and corrosion resistance coatings. Inspired by the self-cleaning behaviour of lotus leaves in na Read More

The mineralization of organic matter in marine sediments by microbial activity was studied in Umm Alhool sabkha. In intertidal surface sediments, the development of steep compositional and physico-chemical gradients was a common phenomenon. Rapidly, oxygen is consumed within the upper few mm of marine mats and sediments. In permeable sediments, however, oxygenated bottom waters may have flew through th Read More

Al Shaheen is located in the central part of the Arabian Gulf and represents the largest offshore oil field in Qatar. Maersk Oil is operating the field on behalf of its partner Qatar Petroleum. This area is also a highly productive marine environment due to a combination of high nutrient loading, strong currents and high temperatures. Observations first reported by offshore platform workers suggest that Al Shaheen hosts one of t Read More

A 3-dimensional hydrodynamic model was developed and calibrated to simulate the thermal mixing zone and predict the fate of residual chlorine and chlorination by-products (CBP) from industrial cooling water discharged from Ras Laffan City. This model is novel since the individual and cumulative effects of cooling water discharges from several outfalls are estimated in a single simulation instead of requiring separate m Read More

Background: Polymer-clay nanocomposite (PCN) materials have become a focus of research due to their unique characteristics and potential commercial applications. Clay addition in polymers improves their properties and may result in better features. PCN materials are reported to have enhanced thermal, mechanical, flame retardation, corrosion protection characteristics. Objectives: This study investigates the effect of Read More

Background: In-plane properties (e.g. stiffness, strength and energy absorption) of two-dimensional cellular structures are generally far inferior to their out-of-plane properties. Therefore, cellular structures with modified morphology and organization, such as hierarchical and functionally graded structures with varying wall thickness or cell size have been developed to improve the in-plane mechanical response. Among the Read More

Three types of polyethylenes (low density: LDPE, medium density: MDPE, and high density: HDPE) were used to investigate the effect of chain branching on the dispersion and adhesion in glass fibre (GF) reinforced polymer composites. The compounding of LDPE/GF, MDPE/GF and HDPE/GF was carried out in a Brabender twin screw extruder. In each composite system, glass fibre was 20% weight and the main matrix was 80 Read More

Today, the use of standard tools of petroleum organic geochemistry is the most convenient way to characterize and quantify contamination of environment by fossil fuel. Good knowledge of natural processes that alter the hydrocarbons during biodegradation, weathering, oxidation or simply evaporation, can also be applied to predict the fate of a pollution. For instance, organic geochemistry played an important role in Read More

The effect of air pollution on human health is considered a major and serious problem, globally. The purpose of air quality monitoring is not merely to collect data but to provide the information required by scientists, policy-makers and planners to enable them to make informed decisions on managing and improving the environment, as well as to present useful information for public end-users. Monitoring fulfills a central role Read More

Maximizing recovery in oil and gas fields relies on geological models that realistically portray the spatial complexity, composition, and properties of reservoir units. Present day arid climate coastal systems, like the coastline of Qatar provide analogues for depositional and diagenetic processes that control reservoir quality in ancient reservoirs. Many major reservoirs in Qatar are formed under conditions that are remarkably simi Read More

Background: Titanium dioxide (TiO2) films have been extensively studied due to their interesting electrical and optical properties. They have the potential to be used for a number of electronic device applications such as dye sensitized photovoltaic cells and also anti-reflective coatings, gas sensors, electrochromic displays and planer wave guides. Objective: Measurement of the electric properties and surface structure analy Read More

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers have played and will continue to play a key role in ocean gas transportation with the increasing demand for energy. Safe operation of LNG carriers requires the knowledge of global and local fluid pressures imposed by the sloshing liquid. As LNG carriers are required to operate in different environmental conditions, safety is a primary consideration in such operations. LNG carriers are often su Read More

The use of conducting polymers as sensing elements in chemical sensors is attracting attention due to their high sensitivity in change of the electrical and optical properties when exposed to different types of gases or liquids. The ease in synthesis of these polymers and sensitivity at room temperature add to the sensors' advantages. This can be of importance particularly considering CO2 sensors that are used in different a Read More

Application of nanotechnology in industrial applications is receiving increased attention this century. Nanotechnology could be used to improve performances of heat exchangers, which are widely used in industrial applications by augmenting heat transfer characteristics of working fluids. Nanofluids, which are engineered colloidal suspensions consisting of nano-sized particles (less than 100 nm) dispersed in a base fluid, ha Read More

This paper describes for the first time the difference in species reactions to the treatment type of date palm fiber. Male and female date palm leaves from two different cultivars--Sheshi female and unknown male--have been considered. Characterization was done for both untreated and NaOH-treated date palm leaves by infrared spectroscopy, thermo gravimetric analysis and scanning electron microscopic techniques. T Read More

The Nile delta basin has a rapidly growing population exceeding 40 million with a need for renewable natural sources of energy and water. This study presents a reliable exploration tool for identifying hydrocarbon reservoirs and aquifers in the Nile delta basin using horizontal to vertical (H/V) spectral ratios of ambient noise measurements. More than 100 measurements were taken using broadband portable stations at three p Read More

Engineered colloidal suspensions of nano-sized particles in base fluids (nanofluids) have shown promise in heat transfer research as a potential for future heat transfer fluid. However, the conflicting reports on the thermal properties of these fluids necessitate a detailed look into the physical mechanisms behind this enhancement. As heat transfer is a surface phenomenon, near-wall fluid flow and temperature measurements Read More

Wind power is one of the world's fastest growing renewable energy sources. Design and performance of wind turbines greatly depend on the atmospheric turbulence on the plant site. Furthermore, turbulent characteristics of the atmospheric boundary layer are of utmost importance in modeling the large-scale meteorological processes, diffusion of atmospheric contaminants, heat transfer and evaporation off of the eart Read More

Alkanolamine solutions are widely used for the removal of acid gases such as CO2 and H2S from process streams containing these components in the industries. The technique has been proven to be reliable and has found wide application in many chemical industries such as ammonia production, coal gasification and natural gas processing. In this work, equilibrium data of CO2 absorption in aqueous solutions of single a Read More

Background: The pool of experienced oil, gas and chemical plant operators, mechanics and other plant personnel is not keeping pace with demand in active oil and gas hubs like in the State of Qatar. Many individuals new to the oil and gas and related industries are being hired. A premium is being placed on getting these individuals quickly trained and qualified to assume increasing job responsibilities. This places great pressur Read More