Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2012 Issue 1

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common liver cancer and one of the commonest solid malignancies. High mortality rates and poor prognosis of the disease are mainly due to late diagnosis, underlying cirrhosis and resistance to chemotherapy. The risk factors of HCC include infections with hepatitis B and C viruses, along with other conditions that cause cirrhosis like: alcoholism and non-alcoholic steatohepatisi Read More

Background and Objectives: Congestion in outpatient departments (OPD) in Qatar's public hospital system is a major problem due to the demographics of the country. Despite the congestion in the general registration and assessment areas, the utilization of doctors' time is considerably low. This paradigm is propagated by (i) the inefficiencies in the appointment system, (ii) the allocation of the resources in th Read More

Background: Previous studies indicated changes of adiponectin levels during gestation. The adiponectin gene ADIPOQ is located on chromosome 3q27. The association of two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (rs1501299 and rs2241766) in ADIPOQ gene with risk of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) was investigated among Arab pregnant women residing in Qatar. Methods: A case-control association study was perform Read More

An efficient method to generate cardiac tissue from other tissues has great therapeutic potential for patients suffering from cardiovascular disease. Pluripotent stem cells, such as embryonic stem (ES) cells, and so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be differentiated into multiple cell types, including cardiac myocytes. However, therapeutic use of these cells has several important risks, including cancer as well as loss o Read More

Background: Calnexin is a lectin-like chaperone in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) lumen, which along with calreticulin are involved in folding, maturation and trafficking of many glycoproteins. Insulin receptor and glucose transporters are among some of the proteins which are synthesized and folded in the ER. Previously, calreticulin was reported to play a role in the folding of GLUT-4 transporter as well as its stability. Furthe Read More

The rapid growth of large data processing has meant the implementation of the MapReduce programming model as a widely accepted solution. The simple map and reduce stages have introduced convenience to programmers in order that they may quickly compose and design complex solutions for large-scale problems. Due to the ever-increasing complexity of execution logic in real-life applications, more and more Map Read More

Pipe inspection is a critical process in many industries, including oil and gas. Conventional practice relies on a range of Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) approaches such as ultrasonic and magnetic flux leakage methods. While these approaches can provide high accuracy wall thickness measurements, which can be used to monitor corrosion, they provide poor visualizations, and are typically unable to provide full pipe co Read More

Arabic is a morphologically rich language. This morphological complexity results in a high out-of-vocabulary rate. That is why a lookup table for pronunciation modeling is not efficient for large vocabulary tasks. In previous research, graphemic modeling was proposed by approximating pronunciation modeling to be graphemes rather than actual phonemes. In this research, we have proposed a hybrid acoustic and pronu Read More

Relaying technologies have been designated as major new enabling technologies for next generation wireless broadband systems, such as 3GPP LTE-Advanced. The practical deployment of decode-and-forward (DF) relaying technologies as supported by the current standard is based on repetition coding, meaning that the relay regenerates the same codeword generated by the source node. This scheme is suboptimal. N Read More

The widespread deployment of varying networking technologies, coupled with the exponential increase in end-user data demand has led to the proliferation of multi-interface enabled devices. To date, these interfaces are mainly utilized independently based on network availability, cost, and user choice. While researchers have focused on simultaneously leveraging these interfaces by aggregating their bandwidths, these solut Read More

In wireless cellular systems, uneven traffic load among the cells increases call blocking rates in some cells and causes low resource utilisation in others and thus degrades user satisfaction and overall performance of the cellular system. Various centralised or semi-centralised Load Balancing (LB) schemes have been proposed to cope with this time persistent problem, however, a fully distributed Self Organising (SO) LB solutio Read More

Background and Objectives: Radio frequency identification (RFID) has paved the way for a plethora of monitoring applications in the field of oil and gas. Degradation in liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)/ liquefied natural gas (LNG) quality and pipe infrastructure can be a nuisance for the oil and gas industry in Qatar. Hence, a human centric cyber-physical-system (CPS) utilizing hybrid wireless technologies including RFIDs and other se Read More

The proliferation of mobile devices equipped with communication technologies such as WiFi, 3G, and 4G, coupled with the exponential growth of online social networking, have increased the demand for social-context-aware systems. These systems leverage social information provided by users with contextual awareness, particularly location, to provide real-time personalized services. With Euromonitor International indicat Read More

Background & Objectives: As the electromagnetic spectrum resource is becoming highly scarce, improving spectral efficiency is becoming extremely important for the development of future wireless communication systems. Integrating cooperative relaying techniques into wireless communication systems sheds new light on better spectral efficiency. By taking advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communi Read More

Geographic information systems (GIS) (also known as Geospatial information systems or Geotechnology) are computer software and hardware systems designed to capture, store and manipulate all types of geographical data, as well as analyze, manage, and display geographic information for informing decision making. Users of GIS range from communities, research institutions, environmental scientists, health organisation Read More

With expansion in the fields of urbanization, technical development and industrialization, Qatar faces the challenge of advancing urban and industrial development while ensuring effective safety and environmental management. Whether assessing environmental quality, the impact of a metro system, or emergency response planning, decision making relies on the integration of disparate sources of data. Geospatial refer Read More

Rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) is a very compute-intensive process. Rendering time of individual frames may vary from a few seconds to several hours depending on the scene complexity, output resolution and quality. For example, a short animation project may be about two minutes in length. It comprises 3600 frames at 30 frames per second (fps). An average rendering time for a fairly simple frame can Read More

One of the radio resource management (RRM) functionalities in LTE systems, call admission control (CAC) is employed to control the number of LTE bearer requests in order to maintain the quality of service (QoS) of the admitted bearers. However, no quality guarantee can be provided due to the inherently dynamic nature of wireless communication. For example, during congestion periods when several communications experi Read More

Information dynamics of different quantum systems under influence of both a phonon bath in contact with the resonator and irreversible decay of the qubits is considered. The focus of our analysis is devoted to multilevel atoms and the effects arising from the coupling to the reservoir. Even in the presence of the reservoirs, the inherent entanglement is found to be rather robust. Due to this fact, together with control of system Read More

This work considers the deployment of the binary consensus algorithm in wireless sensor networks (WSN). This algorithm is applied for the evaluation of the average measurement with the presence of a faulty/attacked node. As this algorithm has been tested theoretically, we deploy it in real life, including its distributed and routing features. In this paper, we propose the development, under simulation environment, of a di Read More

Background and Objectives: Mada, Qatar's Center for Assistive Technology, is a non-profit organization that strives to empower and enable people with disabilities through ICT. During late 2011 and early 2012, Mada conducted research to identify barriers to accessibility in Qatar Methods: In the survey, the key groups of respondents were identified including disabled people themselves. A combination of quantitative and qualitativ Read More

One of the most ambitious goals of Qatar in the next few years is to become a country based on scientific and technical researches instead of being dependent on hydrocarbons. To this end, Qatar Foundation has established a number of high caliber universities and institutes. In particular, Qatar Computing Research Institue (QCRI) is forming a scientific computing multidisciplinary group with a focus on data mining machine Read More

With the advancements in computing and sensing technologies, large amounts of data are collected from various biological systems. These data are a rich source of information about the biological systems they represent. For example, time-series metabolic data can be used to construct dynamic genetic regulatory network models, which can be used not only to better understand the interactions among different genes in Read More

Writer identification consists of identifying the writer of a certain handwritten document and is of high importance in forensic document examination. Indeed, numerous cases over the years have dealt with evidence provided by handwritten documents such as wills and ransom notes. Automatic methods for writer identification can be divided into codebook-based and feature-based approaches. In codebook-based app Read More

Online signatures are acquired using a digital tablet which provides all the trajectories of the signature, as well as the variation in pressure with respect to time. Therefore, online signature verification achieves higher recognition rates than offline signature verification. Nowadays, forensic document examiners distinguish between forgeries, in which an impostor tries to imitate a given signature of another person and disgui Read More