Kareem Darwish joined CMIC at the end of March 2007 as a researcher. Kareem's background is in the area of information retrieval, digital libraries, and natural language processing. He finished his BSc, MS, and PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1995, 1999, and 2003 respectively. Since then he consulted with Kevric, which is a bioinformatics firm in the state of Maryland, and the IBM Human Language Technologies group in Cairo, Egypt. He also taught in the Electrical Engineering Department at the German University in Cairo and the Faculty of Computer and Informatics at Cairo University. Kareem is married and has three children.

Motaz El-Saban was born in Cairo, Egypt 1975. He received his BSc. in 1997 with honors from the electrical and electronics department of the faculty of engineering at Cairo university. He received the MEng degree in 2000 from the same department with specialization in communications and a thesis presenting new techniques for very low bit rate video compression. Motaz got married in 2000 and left Egypt to complete his postgraduate studies in the university of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). He received an MSc and Ph.D. from the electrical and computer engineering department in UCSB in 2004 and 2006 respectively.

The thesis work focused on developing new computer vision and multimedia mining algorithms for bio-molecular images under the supervision of Professor B. S. Manjunath. Shortly after graduation, El-Saban joined NevenVision, a start-up company developing face and object recognition applications for the mobile phones. He held the position of a senior research scientist till August 2006 when NevenVision was acquired by Google. After spending a short while at Google, Motaz decided to take on the exciting opportunity to join Microsoft as a researcher in the newly formed Microsoft Innovation Laboratory in Cairo in Egypt (CMIC). The research interests of Motaz are multimedia (speech, image, video and text) processing, computer vision, intelligent search engines and web mining. Motaz has special passion for applied research, this being one of the key reasons for him to join CMIC. The personal interests of Motaz include soccer, squash and billiards. Motaz won the first prize in an amateur squash championship held at the Santa Barbara Athletic Club.

Nayer Wanas joined Microsoft Innovation Laboratory in Cairo (CMIC) in June 2007. He conducts research in the area of data mining. His main research interests are in data and text mining, information fusion and machine learning. Prior to joining CMIC, he was the program manager for the Data Mining and Computer Modeling Center of Excellence in Egypt since its launch in 2005 and also part of the team that designed and founded the center. He was also the founder and associate of knowledge for development (http://www.k4dev.com), a consultancy in utilizing ICT for development, as well as the ICT for development consultant at Egypt’s ICT Trust fund.

Through his work he was involved in the design of several developmental projects and has conducted research in ICT for development. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence lab at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada where he focused on research in Multiple Classifier Systems. He remains to be affiliated with the Department of Informatics at the Electronics Research Institute, Cairo Egypt where he is currently an Assistant Research Professor.

Nayer Wanas received his Ph.D. in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2003, and his Bachelors and ME from the Electronics and Communications department at Cairo University in 1992 and 1996 respectively.

Ayman Kaheel has a Bachelor degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cairo University 1995, then had his Masters in Computer Science, University of Louisville, KY, USA, 1998 and finally his PhD in Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, BC, Canada, 2005
Ayman Joined CMIC November 2007 as the center's Development Manager. His main interest is in the field of Computer Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Embedded Software.

Ahmed ElArabawy PhD, has joined CMIC on Jan 2009 as an Architect. Ahmed has obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from EE dept. , Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University on 1992, 1994 respectively. He has obtained his PhD from SMU university, Dallas, TX on 2001 on Wireless technologies using OFDM/OFDMA techniques. He has worked for Ericsson R&D center in Dallas (1996 - 2002) focusing on 2G/3G and VoIP systems. Upon his return to Cairo, he has helped the launch of a startup SySDSoft and led its development team working on different wireless technologies (WiFi, WiMAX, UWB, …) and different embedded platforms. He has consulted for a US based WiMAX provider “Solectek” in the development of their WiMAX/WiFi product portfolio. Ahmed is married and has two children.

Ahmed AbdelHamid is one of the earliest CMIC hires. He is a Computer Engineer and a fresh graduate of Cairo University, Faculty of Engineering. He has a great affinity for NLP, linguistics, C++ and Arabic poetry.Mainly his technical role model is Bjarne Stroustrup as well as Professor Ahmed Mokhtar Omar when it comes to Arabic NLP. He considers himself a big fan of Al-Khaleel Ebn Ahmed. Ahmed is currently highly involved in one of CMIC's most advanced projects, IBIS.

Heba Ashour joined CMIC in January, 07. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the American University in Cairo (AUC) in 2006. After graduation, she worked in the field of product development for some time before joining CMIC as an RSDE. She is currently pursuing her graduate studies at the AUC.

Mahmoud Refaat joined CMIC on September 2007. Before joining CMIC, Mahmoud was one of the co-founders of BadrIT, a newly established software development company. He is a graduate from University of Alexandria, Faculty of Engineering, Computer and Systems Engineering Department in 2007. During his first year at CMIC, Mahmoud worked as an RSDE in the Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing team in CMIC. Currently, he has joined the Multimedia and Image Processing group. And he is pursuing his post graduate studies at University of Alexandria. Mahmoud’s main interests in research are content management and information extraction. He believes CMIC introduces the opportunity to explore his area of interests. He also likes reading, watching movies and playing XBOX.

Waleed Ammar graduated in Alexandria University, Computers & Systems Engineering Dept. 2007. Before joining CMIC, Waleed had been working as a teaching assistant in Alexandria University, Computers & Systems Engineering, and as a part-time software developer in “eSpace Technologies” in Alexandria. He is currently working on his masters degree in the same university. On his own words “I thought it would be highly valuable for my career in research to get professional research experience before working on a PhD degree”. Waleed is currently working as a Research Software Development Engineer in the Machine Translation team, he is interested in Natural Language Processing & Security. He also likes driving, swimming, reading and learning about news of software technologies.

May Abdel Reheem joined CMIC March 2008 as a Research Software Development Engineer in CES project . May graduated from the American University in Cairo majoring in Computer Science, Graduated February 2007 with highest honors (Sum Cum Laude)
May is interested in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) combining her love for computer science and psychology and she hopes to do PHD in that field, she is also interested Human Development.
Before joining CMIC May worked in software development then business development at ITWorx.
May is starting her masters in computer science at AUC next Fall and she hopes to specialize in HCI , She finally hopes to make a difference with her work here at CMIC.
May's hobbies are Reading, writing, cooking and walking.

Ahmed EL Deeb joined CMIC in September 2008 after 3 long years of trying to push his game development start-up to compete worldwide. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University. His programming mother tongue is C++ but he feels a great affinity towards dynamic languages, and likes to count algorithms and data structures among his concentration points as well as high level design and software architecture. His affection for technology might have started with the field of computer security, moved to the gaming industry, but there is now scarcely a field in the software industry that doesn't appeal to him.
Ahmed is interested in literature, obsesses by fantasy fiction and harbors the notion that one day he might become a novelist, or at the very least a literary critic. Favorite pastimes are reading, jogging, squash, and TV series.

Hadwa Mamdouh graduated from Faculty of Commerce – Ain Shams University, her major was Business Administration. She joined Microsoft 2 months after her graduation, worked as an Administrative Assistant for 2 years and then she joined CMIC as an Office Manager.
Her hobbies are swimming, movies, music, driving. She is excited and looking forward to gaining as well as adding something in her current job.

Mohamed Zahran received his B.Sc and M.Sc. from Cairo University, both in computer engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Maryland at College Park. He worked as a research scientist at The George Washington University for a year, before joining the Electrical Engineering department at City University of New York. His research interest includes: system software, architecture-compiler interaction, and parallel computing.

Zahran is a member of IEEE (including technical committees of computer architecture and micro architecture), ACM (including special interest groups in computer architecture, micro architecture, operating systems, computer science education, and design automation), as well as Sigma Xi.