To improve the effectiveness of content search in Arabic, allowing Arabic speakers to find the information they need in their own language and increasing the usefulness and discoverability of available Arabic content. Projects within the IR area target both documents and multimedia content and apply both text and image based retrieval techniques.

To leverage tools of collaboration and social media to increase content creation, knowledge sharing, and interactivity that would lead to improving user experience within communities in web-based collaborative platforms. Projects will focus on integration, aggregation, ranking, ordering, tagging and blending content to form richer content within tools of social media. These tools will also facilitate searching through and browsing collaborative content. These technologies will be applied to different domains including, but not limited to, education.

DCS is a set of Services built to take advantage of the recent increase in digitized content and books. DCS provides services which enable users to easily discover information and extract knowledge from large digital content collections. The research agenda for DCS is primarily in Information Extraction, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.

The Media group in CMIC is currently engaged in research efforts aiming at easing the browsing and searching of MM content. Also, Internet access and bandwidth constraints limit the publishing and consumption of digital MM content. This is especially true when using portable publishing devices, such as cell phones, which are widely spread and abundant in the Arab region. Such platforms suffer from limited connectivity resources. Research opportunities under this limited resources environment include devising efficient and effective methods for decreasing bandwidth utilization through efficient MM compression, summarization, and repurposing. We are currently pursuing a number of ideas related to MM summarization in domains such as education and personal videos. The creation of these services and tools can substantially increase significant online digital MM content, particularly in the Arab region.