I had the pleasure of being present at a meeting in Cairo in December of 2005 that included Tarek Kamel, Minister of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) in Egypt and Tarek Elabbady, the Director of CMIC as well as others from the Egyptian Government and Microsoft during which the plan to establish CMIC was formulated. Now, eighteen months later, the laboratory has hired many talented engineers and researchers and has initiated several important projects in Arabic Language processing, e-learning and document management. Several of these projects include collaboration with other groups in Microsoft including the existing Microsoft office in Cairo, MSN and Microsoft Research, local Egyptian universities as well as the world famous Library of Alexandria. I am proud of the progress our team has made in this short time. I am also pleased that the laboratory has begun a vibrant collaboration with the Egyptian academic community and other technology leaders in the region.

Egypt has a long tradition of scholarship and has contributed leaders in engineering, science and computer science. This has benefited Microsoft and other global technology companies although this often required Egyptian engineers and researchers to work abroad. With the inception of CMIC, in a limited but important way, Microsoft researchers can work in Egypt and participate in the development of the local software community as well as contributing, as has historically been the case, to Microsoft Innovation.

"Egypt has a long tradition of scholarship and has contributed leaders in engineering, science and computer science."

I hope you will enjoy the newsletter and the progress it chronicles. Congratulations to the Microsoft team and thanks to the local technology community which has extended such a warm welcome.

CMIC's Vision: Impressions from Tarek Elabbady

Welcome to our Cairo Microsoft Innovation lab's (CMIC) first newsletter. This edition will be a collection of the center's founding team view of CMIC's inception and what it can bring to the IT industry in the Middle East and Africa. I will share my own perception of the drivers behind CMIC creation, characteristics of the center's mission and our approach to execute the vision.

Those of you, who have been following the IT industry in our region, may have recently noticed the frequent calls for innovation in discussions of the industry future plans. Microsoft views these calls for innovation as positive indicators of the local IT community's readiness to grow their ecosystem to a higher maturity level.

"Our applied research and incubation lab in Egypt (CMIC) is an investment responding to calls for R&D from the region"

In fact, the rise in research and innovation activities is normally correlated with productivity of related industry. This productivity is the fuel driving life and health to the industry.

Why Egypt? Our new applied research and incubation lab in Egypt (CMIC) is an example of Microsoft's response to innovation calls. This time the call came from the Egyptian government, represented in H.E. Tarek Kamel Minister of Communication and Information Technology. Egypt's central geographical location, advanced IT infrastructure, the Egyptian government commitment to the IT industry, and the sizable talent pool, were leading elements behind Microsoft's choice of Egypt as the site of the company's second applied research center worldwide. In general, the company also believes that intelligent efforts that bring local talents closer to their global peers in adopting best practices of research and incubation, normally result in direct-impact innovations.

• Collaborative
• Applied
• Research & incubation

The "Collaborative", comes from our inherent belief that new concept innovation is more effective in a collaborative setup. "Applied", is a reference to the relatively short time between the inception of CMIC innovations and the time these innovations can materialize to actual products in the market. "Research & Incubation" stresses that CMIC's deliverables are prototypes supported by business propositions and not commercial products.

A core strategy for CMIC is to drive focus in all of its activities in order to generate expertise. We hire well-matched researchers in a limited number of technology areas, and focus the team innovations on solving specific problem spaces. For example, we picked content management with emphasis on the Arabic language as our first technology focus area solving education, libraries and healthcare problems.

CMIC'S Research Partners

CMIC's Partners: Engaging Egypt's Universities in Applied Research

On July 1st, 2007 CMIC engaged with four large Universities in Cairo, Egypt. CMIC invited various Universities from Egypt to submit research proposals to be fully funded for a one year period by Cairo Microsoft Innovation lab. The winning proposals came from the following universities: American University in Cairo, Ain Shams University, Helwan University, and Cairo University. CMIC is donating the needed hardware for these projects and funding the cash amount which includes researcher salaries and lab renovations. The total amount to fund these proposals is an approximate figure of 1,040,200 LE.

"CMIC is renovating two computer labs at both Cairo University and Ain Shams University"

The proposals that were submitted by these Universities were actually in the stream of research topics that CMIC is highly interested in. The Universities will investigate topics to promote education such as handwriting improvement, data collection from e-learning to improve the university lecture environment, and improvement of information summarization on mobile devices. These proposals are also a great opportunity to engage Egyptian Universities in the kind of research that CMIC is interested in, which is applied research. The center is highly interested in building an applied research hub in Egypt and eventually the region, and engaging with the Universities is the 1st step to promote an applied research culture in the academic community.

Each University that submitted a proposal has a full research staff onsite at the university available to advance the research. The universities hired several top students attending the University to take part of the research as valuable interns. The goal is not only to engage the already developed faculty community in each university but to also take advantage of the untapped student talent available at each campus. The center is taking this opportunity to engage and contact University undergraduates, Graduate students, and PHD candidates that might eventually make their way to be part of CMIC. Not only that, but CMIC is renovating two computer labs at both Cairo University and Ain Shams University, both of which are public sector universities or state schools.

In the Press: CMIC and Bibliotheque Alexandrina Working Together

Alexandria Library and Microsoft represented in the Egyptian Research Center signed a memorandum of understanding that aims at participating in developing digital library services and balanced networking computers to serve library visitors. Both sides agreed on working together to launch the innovative digital library services and to determine and execute research products that circle around these services with a main target that is represented in improving digital content accessibility as well as supporting searchers society with the essential tools that improve the library's abilities. Both sides shall also work on a wide scale to execute a number of projects that serve those purposes together. Library Manager Serag Al Din said that the new agreement held with the Egyptian Innovation lab is represented in finding newly created services in the field of digital libraries and human resources in addition to determining research curriculums available in the advanced digital library framework. He added that the library is keen on achieving global leadership in IT and the digital field seeking to act as scientists meeting point. The Egyptian Innovation lab Manager Dr Tarek Elabbady added that the center shall work with the library to offer a group of the innovative solutions in the field of E-content management created by the Egyptian minds leveraging Microsoft technology, the library's content and its staff experience in similar projects.

The above press release was published in several Egyptian newspapers and related news agency websites. The most significant of which are Al Gomhuria, Al Akhbar, Al Alam Al Youm, and Al Wafd.

Research Focus Areas

Arabic Content Management

The region has a long history in developing and researching natural language processing technologies with emphasis on local languages (e.g. Arabic). CMIC team realized, on one hand, the convenience of bringing to the team local unique skills in the NLP field, and on another hand, the opportunity presented by the different digitization initiatives in the region. The team selected content management as the center's general focus technology area, again with emphasis on local languages (e.g. Arabic).

While content management is a significantly wide field, CMIC researchers will be focusing on few of its aspects like: Information retrieval, data mining, document analysis and digital library services.

Information retrieval is the science of retrieving relevant information from data sources to answer user needs. IR is one of the main focus areas of CMIC, where our interest covers a spectrum of components.

1. data source: text (web documents search), image as in enabling search in digitized books (digital library), video as in monitoring events of interest in live TV feed and audio as in enabling efficient access to recorded university lectures.
2. Retrieval process: work on the query side and on the features and ranking sides.
3. Answering user needs: such as web searching and answering student questions as in E-lecture.

The focus on content and the services associated with it presents a wealth of data, in a variety of different formats, which needs to be handled effectively and efficiently. This amount of data needs to be analyzed from a variety of perspectives and condensed in the most compact form to help improve performance of content management systems. One of the technologies that present themselves strongly in this area is those pertaining to Data Mining. Cairo Microsoft Innovation Centre will be working in utilizing the different technologies within data mining in its various services and applications currently being developed, an squarely applies to the e-Lecture program currently being researched in CMIC.

CMIC (Cairo Microsoft Innovation lab) has been working closely with universities in Egypt to introduce new educational environments. Through this process, data on student interaction within this new setting will be analyzed to present different perspectives to the stakeholders involved. These stakeholders include the students, instructors, administration amongst others. The amounts of data and content being collected from this setup will mandate that data mining technologies be utilized to summarize and conscience this data into knowledge. In turn this knowledge would be used to help improve the quality of the service being provided and efficiency of any information retrieval task required.

Recent book digitization efforts, such as the Million Book Project (Reddy and St. Clair 2002), led to the digitization of millions of books in a variety of languages. One might say: "Wow!! We are now bookunaires with access to millions of books!", but are they of any use? Aside from the legal issues surrounding the distribution and licensing of digitized books, effectively accessing and using the books is shaping to be a tough challenge. Initial attempts have focused on providing search capabilities to the digitized books. The process typically involves performing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the scanned images and then indexing the output of the OCR for later search. However, many problems arose from the process OCR due to the fact that OCR'ed text typically contains errors. The number of errors is dependent on many factors including the print quality of the original book, the font of the book, the scanning process, and the language of the book, where in some languages; the OCR engines continue to be poor. Much research was conducted to alleviate the problems introduced by the OCR process (Doermann 1998) on English (Taghva et al. 1994) as well as other languages such as Arabic (Darwish and Oard 2002) and Chinese (Tseng and Oard 2001). Even with all the advances in search technology, a fundamental problem remained, namely "search" provides the entry point into accessing digital books but does not provide the required navigational support within the content. To provide this navigational support, innovative services need to be developed to enhance the utility of the digitized books. How will these services look like? Stay tuned! Soon a bookunaire can cash the books.

Kareem Darwish, Douglas W. Oard (2002). Term selection for searching printed Arabic, SIGIR 2002: 261-268, 2002.

David Doermann (1998). The Indexing and Retrieval of Document Images: A Survey, The Journal of Computer Vision and Image Understanding: CVIU, Volume 70, Number 3, 1998.

Raj Reddy and Gloriana St. Clair (2002). The Million Book Project. Project proposal to NSF. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University.

Kazem Taghva and Julie Borsack and Allen Condit (1994). Results of applying probabilistic IR to OCR text, SIGIR-1994.

Yuen-Hsien Tseng and Douglas Oard (2001). Document Image Retrieval Techniques for Chinese, Proceeding of Symposium on Document Image Understanding Technology, Columbia, Maryland, April 23-25, 2001.

Community Relations

Engaging the Student Community

One of CMIC's key goals is to engage the Egyptian academic community and to encourage the advancement of applied research among the undergraduate student community. In this effort, CMIC took on the mission of launching a non-traditional internship program for summer 2007. The normal way of hunting for an internship is for a student to submit his/her resume and go through a set of interviews to prove that he/she are the best candidate. Instead, CMIC launched an internship competition for interested junior undergraduates to participate in. The idea was for each interested candidate to form a 3-4 member team and to write a proposal about a research topic that CMIC is focusing on. In this case the topics included are creation of an application or service for Mobile Devices, Internet Service which leverages communities and collaborative filtering, a Service which drives or facilitates the creation of Arabic language content on the Internet, applications or services which processes, mines, analyzes Arabic Content, and finally Peer to Peer applications or services.

"The finalists were from three different universities: American University in Cairo, Ain Shams University, and finally Cairo University."

Thirty-nine proposals were electronically submitted and were screened by CMIC researchers. The top three finalists were invited to CMIC in order to present their idea in front of the center. The finalists were from three different universities: American University in Cairo, Ain Shams University, and finally Cairo University. In the end the winning team from the American University in Cairo presented a well researched and organized idea. Their idea was a building on blue tooth technology to build a BlueRoom. In the winning team's own words, the statement of the problem was described in the following:

"BSpark will allow its users to use their Bluetooth enabled mobile phones to automatically share files immediately after they are created with other users. A room is created by one member, which will be referred to as a BlueRoom. Any BlueRoom member will be able to invite other members to join. Any member who creates a file in the room - for example captures an image - will have it instantaneously transferred to all the members of the room the moment it is captured. The introduction of this empowerment will save considerable time taken by people who want to share files to numerous destinations, needless to mention, it will achieve that on the spot thus preserving the essence of social events."

Community Relations: It's Time for Teenovation

As a way to introduce CMIC to our community, we initiated a competition, Teenovation, targeted towards Egyptian teens. The competition is, as the name implies, concerned with inspiring the teens to innovate in general & in the field of IT in specific. Teenovation proved to serve many purposes for CMIC. Besides introducing us to our community, the competition measures level of interest in applied IT research - CMIC's main focus - among the younger generation in Egypt. It also helps us spot the most creative among teenagers in our society. This gives us a clear indication about the talent pool.

The theme of Teenovation was social networks and education. The participants were asked to think of a way to leverage the use of social networks to enhance a teenager's educational experience. The winner, Ehab Ashraf, proposed to create a study section in the social network containing multiple resources for studying and collaboration with others. As a reward, he will be granted a 2-weeks internship at CMIC starting mid August and a Zune device. We aim for the internship to expose Ehab to the concept of Research through an assignment to conduct a comparative study between the most commonly used social networks. In the end he should reach a hypothesis about what makes a social network popular amongst teens in Egypt.

CMIC's Picture Gallery: H.E. Ahmed Nazif, H.E Tarek Kamel, & Craig Mundie Guests of Honor at CMIC's Induction

The Cairo Microsoft Innovation lab Team