Project Abstract

Microblogs are special virtual social network web-based applications. Users of microblogs are allowed to post relatively short messages (corpuses) compared to regular blogs. This encouraged many users to become more active, as the effort they need to put to post a message is very small. On the other hand, following the microblogs is becoming more challenging as users can receive thousands of corpus updates every day. Going through all the corpuses updates is a time consuming process and affects the user’s productivity in real life, especially for the users who have a lot of followees and thousands of tweets arriving at their timelines every day. In this project, we propose a personalized recommendation system that will aim to give the user a summary of all received corpuses. Considering the fact that the user interests change over time (and location), this summary should be based on the user’s level of interest in the topic of the corpus at the time of reception. Our method considers three major elements: users’ dynamic level of interest in a topic, user’s social relationship such as the number of followers, their real geographical neighborhood, and other explicit features related to the publishers’ authority and the tweet’s content.

SmartCI has led the efforts to encourage innovations in the SmartCI research areas of interest through hosting innovative multidisciplinary research projects that target the development of Egypt’s critical infrastructure.

WHAT DO WE CALL FOR?

SmartCI Research Center is planning to incubate up to 10 research teams in every cycle to write their research proposals through monthly research incentive of 1500 EGP for each team member and up to 10000 EGP upon proposal acceptance from the target funding agency.

RESEARCH AREAS OF INTEREST

• Water Supply Systems
• Renewable Energy
• Intelligent Transportation
• Healthcare services
• Power Systems
• Emergency services
• Educational systems
• Communications & Networking
• Government services
• Food and agriculture

Downloads

SmartCI Call for Concept Paper.
Concept Paper Template.
List of Funding Opportunities.
List of Funding Agencies.
Call for Concept Paper Brochure.
Booklet of First Call Proposal Writings Abstracts..

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Concept paper submission through this form.
• Any submissions after the submission deadline will be excluded.
• Questions, comments or suggestions should be directed to: smartci_q@mena.vt.edu.

TIMELINE

• Concept paper submission opens: January 1^st, 2014 – 2pm.
• Concept paper submission deadline: February 1^st, 2014 – 2pm. Extended to February 15^th, 2014 – 2pm.
• Final decision announcement: March 1^st, 2014. Moved to March 15^th, 2014.
• Revised concept paper submission deadline: March 8^th, 2014. Moved to March 22^nd, 2014.
  
• Contracts signing: March 15^th to 22^nd, 2014. Moved to March 25^th to March 29^th, 2014.
• Hosting researchers starts on April 1^st, 2014

SmartCI has led the efforts to encourage innovations in the SmartCI research areas of interest through hosting innovative multidisciplinary research projects that target the development of Egypt’s critical infrastructure.

WHAT DO WE CALL FOR?

SmartCI Research Center is planning to incubate up to 15 research teams in every cycle to write their research proposals through monthly research incentive of 1500 EGP for each team member and up to 10000 EGP upon proposal acceptance from the target funding agency.

RESEARCH AREAS OF INTEREST

• Water Supply Systems
• Renewable Energy
• Intelligent Transportation
• Healthcare services
• Power Systems
• Emergency services
• Educational systems
• Communications & Networking
• Government services
• Food and agriculture

Details, guidelines and the overall process of the call are clarified in the SmartCI Call for Concept Paper.
Applicants must use the following proposed Concept Paper Template.
Applicants may use List of Funding Opportunities and List of Funding Agencies.
Call for Concept Paper Brochure.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Concept paper submission by e-mail to: sci@mena.vt.edu.
• Applicants should use the Concept Paper Template.
• Any submissions after the submission deadline will be excluded.
• Questions, comments or suggestions should be directed to: smartci_q@mena.vt.edu.
• Frequently asked questions will be posted on FAQ.

TIMELINE

• Concept paper Submission opens: July 1, 2013 – 2pm.
• Concept paper Submission deadline: August 1, 2013 – 2pm.
• Deadline Extension:
  Concept paper Submission Deadline has been extended to: August 15, 2013 – 2pm.
• Final decision announcement: September 1, 2013.
• Final Decision Extension:
  Final Decision has been moved to: September 15, 2013.

Abstract

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a challenging task, whose difficulty depends on the nature of the document and on the document’s language. In that context, handwritten documents are more difficult than printed onesو and some language scripting systems are more difficult than others. The Arabic scripting system is one of the most difficult for OCR. Moreover the research work on Arabic is generally relatively limited compared to Latin and Asian languages. One of the obstacles facing research in Arabic OCR is the lack of publicly available large datasets for training intelligent OCR systems, along with a standard benchmark tests on these datasets.

The goal of this project is to advance the state of the art in recognizing and Arabic handwritten documents. The specific objects are the following:

• Collect a very large dataset of Arabic handwritten documents with ground truth.
• Create a benchmark evaluation framework for the collected dataset and make it publicly available for the research community.
• Conduct a thorough comparative study with state of the art techniques on the collected dataset.

Use the dataset to experiment with multiple modern machine learning techniques that have never been applied before to Arabic OCR.

Abstract

Road congestion is one of the major traffic problems in Egypt. Traffic congestion leads to time loss, wasted fuel, inability to forecast travel time, and preventing emergency vehicles from timely response. Intelligent traffic management help address some of the causes and consequences of traffic accidents and congestion. The project aims to build a real time big data analytics framework that uses GSM data, and information from social networks (e.g., Bey2ollak, waze.com, and twitter) to provide a universal real time traffic management system that helps

(1) Reduce congestion,
(2) Detect emergencies and accidents,
(3) Guide people in case of emergencies, and
(4) Estimate travel time for public transportation.

Project PI: Dr. Masoud ElGhoniemy
Project Team: Dr. Ahmed Allam, and Prof. Ramesh Pokharel
Research area: Intelligent transportation

Abstract

Railroads play a major role in Egypt‘s economy through providing a cost effective means of transportation for humans and goods. Recently, the Egyptian railroads have been implicated by major accidents. The major source of these accidents has been attributed to miscommunications between the road crossing operators and the train driver. The primitive equipment use accentuates the effect of human errors.

Radars have been successfully introduced in the automotive industry for safety and leisure reasons. Automotive radar presents a systematic method of warning that reduces human intervention in accident prevention and control, which led to its widespread adoption in high-end cars.

Radars as collision warning and prevention systems can be an important part of the R&D policies to mitigate railroad accidents. The proposed radar is an extension to the radar currently used in automotive design that operates in the GHz range with added features that pertain to railroad. These features represent the characteristics of the railroads which include extended range, type of objects to be detected and the different warning types.

Abstract

Using  ICT  technologies  such  as  computerized  curricula  and  educational  games  is  proved  to  be  very  effective  in  improving learning experience of children. However, the cost of delivering such technologies to all governmental schools may not be afforded by the government.

This project incorporates knowledge from distributed systems and human-computer interaction to reduce the digital gap between the children and adults who have access to ICT facilities and those who don’t due to their social, economic, or geographical reasons. Specifically, it aims to achieve the following goals:

• Create a prototype for a low-cost digital infrastructure that can be conveniently deployed in  under-developed  rural  areas  where  IT  services  are  either  costly  or  not  available.
• Reduce the cost of using ICT technologies in children’s education through adoption of this infrastructure by public schools.

Design educational applications to engage semiliterate adults in learning activities.  The applications’ interfaces will be designed to have minimal learning cost so that adults focus on the educational content of the application. The applications will be deployed in public spaces to transform learning to a service that semiliterate adults can get anytime, anywhere at their convenience.

Abstract

This Project will help in fast and accurate diagnosis for medical images. It is targeting to limit and minimize user interaction needed to process segmentation. Reports are automatically generated metadata describing the images will be saved and accessed through web. After analysis of the 3D models, the generated reports can be saved to the patient medical records or integrated using medical standards like hl7.

This project supports teleradiology, which is the transmission of medical images from one location to another, a technology that is needed and currently is very expensive. There is still a lot of room for improvement and solving its accuracy, image quality, lossless image compression, and transmission speed problems. Focus on clinical governance, medico-legal issues and quality assessment should also be considered.

The project will also provide:

• Radiologist desktop tools for speed diagnosis and reporting.
• ·Cloud based server side image processing for tablet and mobile.
• Cloud based Web access for reports and images using html5 interface.

Archiving and retrieval system for old cases to help in statistical learning and educational purposes.

Project PI: Dr. Mohamed Nasr
Project Team: Dr. Nader Bayoumi
Research area: Numerical modelling / Ophthalmology

Abstract

Glaucoma is a characteristic optic neuropathy in which intraocular pressure (IOP) is a significant risk factor. Lowering of the IOP can be achieved medically or surgically. Surgical lowering of the IOP can be achieved by a number of surgical options, the most consistent and time-tested of which is the external fistulising operation, commonly known as Cairn’s trabeculectomy.

Currently, the implementation of the trabeculectomy procedure is solely based on the surgeon skills and expertise, with no clear understanding of the engineering basics. The project aims to use numerical simulations to better understand the physics of trabeculectomy, along with some sensitivity analyses, in an effort to standardise its procedure.

Being able to standardise the trabeculectomy procedure and understand its physical basics will be a milestone in the field of glaucoma surgeries, which will lead to more consistent, repeatable and successful surgeries.

Specifically, the project targets to create a numerical model for the trabeculectomy operation, in an attempt to predict the flow of aqueous humour through the fistula created by the operation, and thus the expected reduction of IOP, at least in part.

Abstract

As a result of Egypt’s growing energy demand, the government plans to increase the amount of power generated from renewable sources, particularly wind and solar energy. Therefore, developing the technology of renewable energy can be regarded as a vital need in Egypt.

This project is concerned with one of the most important types of renewable energy, namely “the solar cells”. This project aims is to produce a high performance chalcopyrite thin film solar cell applying innovative preparation ideas and treatments. The effect of the preparation techniques and conditions on the properties of each of the deposited films and consequently on the cell performance as a whole will then be studied. Chalcopyrite-type materials are selected as they are considered to be the most promising thin-film solar cell materials. They exhibit direct band gaps well matched to the solar spectrum in addition to their very favorable electronic properties.