"Afterall, sound research can only lead to innovation and innovation is bound to be the currency for advancement in this new millennium, it is the sign of the times. But, hey, innovation is CMIC’s middle name! "

By Mona Diab, PhD, Center for Computational learning systems, Columbia University

I first heard about CMIC (Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center) when I was invited to give the keynote speech at the 6th Language Engineering conference in Ain Shams University (arguably one of the top universities in Egypt). The title of my talk was admittedly controversial, “Automatic Processing of Arabic(s)”, which generated a lot of heated discussions. However, I was fortunate that in the audience were many supporters among which was CMIC’s program manager, Mr Ahmed Shimi. I had heard of the managing director, Dr Tarek El-Abbady, through some Egyptian colleagues here in the USA and about the CMIC initiative, but I did not know much about it. Shimi and I had some stimulating discussions after my talk. He graciously invited me to give a talk at CMIC and meet with the members of the CMIC team. Needless to say, I was curious and keen to find out more, so I accepted. That CMIC meeting said it all for me. It was the first time that I encountered in Egypt a group of people who are serious about research in ways that are constructive both to the intellectual capacity of the country and to the economic well-being of the local and parent enterprises. I was impressed.

In this digitized age, it is becoming more apparent than ever the impact of information. It is all again literally “about time”, time is of the essence. People have no time to write in structured ways. Communication media have changed radically, they have been transformed and the name of the game is now constant change in an unstructured world. New forms of communication using multimodal, multilingual and multigenre -- such as blogs and social networks -- are emerging and dynamically changing our means of representation and access and use of information, let alone our functionality and cultural perceptions. These forms require serious rethinking of online information processing solutions, they need creativity. For instance, using search and retrieval techniques such as information retrieval coupled with mining and information extraction on unstructured data would yield automatically structured data that could be a significant catalyst in propelling technologies (businesses, government agencies) forward leaps and bounds with their ability to visualize and distill such data. Language lies at the core of information processing, hence the significance of language technologies.

The time is apt for seriously getting involved. The field of natural language technology (NLT) has reached a level of maturity that is optimal for technology transfer from academic and industrial research labs to the masses. The time is ripe. Practitioners in the field sense that we have a good handle on the scope of many of the problems, however, the field is far from being saturated with solutions or even questions. The subject area, NLT, is at the confluence of many disciplines: machine learning, computer science, data mining, computational linguistics, among others. Serious advances have been achieved in these disciplines separately and integratively. Yet the specific focus area of Arabic language technologies still leaves a lot to be desired. Arabic poses a special challenge to the state of the art partly due to the myriad of forms of the language and the ubiquity of dialects that are yet to have written standards. CMIC strategically decided to focus on issues related to language technologies, with a special emphasis on Arabic. Backed by the wealth of knowledge, resources and history of Microsoft, its physical immersion in the local regional and Egyptian markets, its strategic location in the Smart village in Egypt, and with access to a huge talent pool from local academia and international expats, CMIC, at the crossroads, should be uniquely positioned to offer local customizable solutions with a global flavor to challenges posed for technology by the intracacies of the Arabic language. Such solutions would empower the Arabic speaker to be a full fledged citizen of the knowledge world. The solutions produced would be inherently culturally sensitive to the needs of the local community hence allowing them to compete in a global economy. It is about time that such a research center exists in the region.

CMIC has been very successful in attracting top quality researchers in the country to join its team. The secret is the stress on quality rather than quantity, hence making CMIC an attractive environment to associate with. Their idea for cross pollination of the local research environment, via grants to top researchers in the world, is only one of their creative solutions to address both quality and quantity of research simultaneously. CMIC serves as a model for young and upcoming investigators in the field. The teaming model is quite successful where new recruits (RSDE) are paired with senior researchers. RSDEs apart from their responsibilities, are given time to choose an independent research topic allowing room for creativity. Such an environment is more akin to academic research labs yet without losing sight of real application problems. I believe this is a genuine recipe for industrial success especially if CMIC continues to recruit quality senior researchers who serve as both mentors and role models thereby maintaining its investment in the human capital. “Afterall, sound research can only lead to innovation and innovation is bound to be the currency for advancement in this new millennium, it is the sign of the times. But, hey, innovation is CMIC’s middle name! “

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