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Information Retrieval (IR)
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.
Collaborative Content Services (CCS)
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.
Digital Content Services (DCS)
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.
CMIC Explorations, and future plans
In light of CMIC's charter to promote the mass adoption of technology in the MEA
region, we believe the fields of education, healthcare and entertainment present
us with the best prospects to realize maximum impact. In terms of value, however,
education and healthcare come first. The expansion of CMIC's activities into the
domain of healthcare affords us the opportunity to foster Microsoft's image and
citizenship in the region, drive the creation of local ecosystems surrounding health
informatics solutions as well as realize business value of innovation. Many of the
technologies currently being incubated at CMIC, including text & multimedia information
retrieval, data mining and content-tagging within the context of community-based
collaborative content, and the visualization of community-based interaction are
amenable to application within healthcare scenarios.
The segmented nature of the healthcare industry in developing markets renders it
difficult to standardize services across the board. We have therefore chosen to
narrow our focus on government ministries and international institutions in the
field of health as single, over-arching entities through which to affect the masses.
Rather than plug into existing solutions, our current strategy revolves around filling
a void by specifically catering to and subsequently empowering healthcare decision
makers and public health researchers with innovative tools and services.
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CMIC Academic Grants Program 2008
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CMIC is offering research grants as part of the mission to promote a collaborative
culture of research and innovation in the Middle East and Africa. The grants are
open to researchers worldwide working on areas of interest to CMIC. Through the
grants researchers will have a chance to work with local talent on existing or emerging
problems of mutual interest.
This is a request for research proposals for the year 2008. This year Cairo Microsoft
Innovation lab (CMIC) will focus on bringing research scholars from North America
and Western Europe closer to the Egyptian research community. Proposals submitted
MUST involve the presence of the research scholar applicant in Egypt and
preferably coordinate with local Egyptian researchers. Through this program CMIC
will sponsor up to 3 proposals for the year 2008.
read more
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Wael Bahaa-El-Din
The CMIC is an Asset to Microsoft, Egypt and Millions of People around the World.
I am impressed with the progress of the Cairo Microsoft Innovation lab (CMIC) during
its first two years of development. CMIC has hired excellent leaders and talent,
has formulated a strong vision, developed close alliances with local universities
and industry, aligned the center's vision with its role to improve the life of the
world wide Egyptian and Arab community, and made some innovations that will be included
in Microsoft products. CMIC has focused on important technologies already such as
information retrieval and content retrieval.
read more
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Abdelsalam 'Solom' Heddaya
As a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1980s, I dreamt of creating a
research center in Ismailia, Egypt, that would focus on problems drawn from the
regional context, and provide regional industry with the potential to beat developed-country
products in 3rd-world markets. I wrote a proposal for this center and circulated
it among family, friends and colleagues. Many thought it could not be done, or if
created, would not survive.
In the two decades since then, Egypt has changed dramatically, as measured by sustained
impressive economic growth, far ahead of population growth, for most of that period.
In visiting Egypt regularly, I could clearly see huge improvements accumulate from
year to year.
read more
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Mona Diab
I first heard about CMIC (Cairo Microsoft Innovation lab) 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.
read more
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Tarek Elabbady
This CMIC newsletter edition targets expats from Egypt and neighboring countries
who currently live in Europe and North America. As an expat myself who recently
moved back to Egypt after 20 years of living in the USA, I will gladly share my
recent experience and the evolution of my perceptions throughout the past year with
you.
Like many expats, I left Egypt for what I thought would be a temporary educational
experience in the US, after which I would head back to work and enjoy the family
and social life that I grew up with.
read more
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Highlights
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Our foremost highlight was the vote of confidence CMIC team received from Microsoft
management that resulted in expansion of the team charter, team size and budget.
The new expansion team will plan and execute a strategy to effectively support the
Arabic language in Microsoft products. The team will develop middleware to support
Arabic language applications, and will manage relationships with partners taking
on Arabic localization jobs. Longer term, the CMIC-ATT team will help implement
new concepts envisioned by the CMIC-Applied Research Team (ART) in the areas of
Arabic document services, Arabic information retrieval, and Collaborative Arabic
Content Analysis.
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