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