What Does a Static, Sustainable Economy Look Like?

As resources diminish, research and innovation will be needed to compensate for their scarcity. How will computer science contribute to such a situation?

Vinton G. Cerf

The SolarWinds Hack, and a Grand Challenge for CS Education

John Arquilla analyzes the latest in a long line of cyber intrusions, while Mark Guzdial considers how to prepare CS students for professional decision making.

John Arquilla, Mark Guzdial

Deep Learning Speeds MRI Scans

Machine intelligence significantly reduces the time needed for an MRI scan, which can help reduce patient anxiety.

Paul Marks

The Best of NLP

Natural language processing delves more deeply into its knowledge gap.

Chris Edwards

The Worsening State of Ransomware

Sophisticated, dangerous ransomware is the new normal … and there is no simple fix.

Samuel Greengard

From Remote Work to Working From Anywhere

Tracing temporary work modifications resulting in permanent organizational changes.

Mari Sako

Reflections on Black in Computing

Seeking to improve systemic fairness in the computing realm.

Q. Brown, T. Grandison, J. D. Burge, O. C. Jenkins, T. Dillahunt

The Non-Psychopath's Guide to Managing an Open Source Project

Respect your staff, learn from others, and know when to let go.

George V. Neville-Neil

When Hackers Were Heroes

The complex legacy of Steven Levy's obsessive programmers.

Thomas Haigh

Roots of 'Program' Revisited

Considering the fundamental nature and malleability of programming.

Liesbeth De Mol, Maarten Bullynck

Building a Multilingual Wikipedia

Seeking to develop a multilingual Wikipedia where content can be shared among language editions.

Denny Vrandečić

An AI-Enabled Future for Qatar and the Region

The majority of Qataris are underemployed and working in government white collar jobs that are precisely the occupations likely to be made redundant by AI.

Ashraf Aboulnaga, Sanjay Chawla, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Mohammed Al-Mannai, Hassan Al-Sayed

Traffic Routing in the Ever-Changing City of Doha

Addressing traffic routing problems with sparse data.

Sofiane Abbar, Rade Stanojevic, Shadab Mustafa, Mohamed Mokbel

ArabHCI: Five Years and Counting

Building a community of Arab students and faculty interested in Human-Computer Interaction and a platform to connect with established HCI researchers.

Shaimaa Lazem, Mennatallah Saleh, Ebtisam Alabdulqader

Data Science for the Oil and Gas Industry in the Arab Region

The Arab region is well positioned for building world-class data science teams to fill the supply shortage of data professionals, especially in the oil and gas field critical to region's economy.

Motaz El Saban

Building a Research University in the Arab Region: The Case of KAUST

Though KAUST shares many of the operational mechanisms of western universities, it has a unique model of operation that deviates from most modern universities in several important aspects.

E. N. (Mootaz) Elnozahy

Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in Lebanon

Despite the challenges that Lebanon has faced over the past five years, several success stories materialized in its entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Walid R. Touma, Saad El Zein

Building a Preeminent Research Lab in the Arab Region: The Case of QCRI

QCRI was created with a mandate to support Qatar's transformation from a carbon economy to a knowledge-based economy.

Ahmed Elmagarmid, Abdellatif Saoudi

Autonomous Driving in the Face of Unconventional Odds

Finding solutions to the challenges that will help deliver autonomous driving to world regions in desperate need of it.

Hesham M. Eraqi, Ibrahim Sobh

The Strategic Pursuit of Artificial Intelligence in the United Arab Emirates

An overview of the United Arab Emirates' unique and visionary pursuit of artificial intelligence.

Farah E. Shamout, Dana Abu Ali

Cyber Security Research in the Arab Region: A Blooming Ecosystem with Global Ambitions

The Arab world's response to cyber security challenges does not happen without tension or regional specificity.

Christina Pöpper, Michail Maniatakos, Roberto Di Pietro

A Panoramic Survey of Natural Language Processing in the Arab World

Though Arabic NLP has many challenges, it has seen many successes and developments.

Kareem Darwish, Nizar Habash, Mourad Abbas, Hend Al-Khalifa, Huseein T. Al-Natsheh, Houda Bouamor, Karim Bouzoubaa, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Samhaa R. El-Beltagy, Wassim El-Hajj, Mustafa Jarrar, Hamdy Mubarak

Networking Research for the Arab World: From Regional Initiatives to Potential Global Impact

The Arab region opens ample room for communications and networking innovations and services and contributes to the critical mass of global networking innovation.

Basem Shihada, Tamer Elbatt, Ahmed Eltawil, Mohammad Mansour, Essaid Sabir, Slim Rekhis, Sanaa Sharafeddine

Non-Traditional Data Sources: Providing Insights into Sustainable Development

The paucity of data on the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals provides an opportunity to use non-traditional data sources as a complement, in particular through the use of artificial intelligence.

Ingmar Weber, Muhammad Imran, Ferda Ofli, Fouad Mrad, Jennifer Colville, Mehdi Fathallah, Alissar Chaker, Wigdan Seed Ahmed

Database Systems Research in the Arab World: A Tradition that Spans Decades

Prominent database researchers are settling within the Arab region and furthering its database research culture.

Ashraf Aboulnaga, Azza Abouzied, Karima Echihabi, Mourad Ouzzani

The Arab World Prepares the Exascale Workforce

A menu of Awareness, Examples, Instruction, Opportunity, and Utilization will Yield members of the exascale workforce, mnemonically: A, E, I, O, U and sometimes — hopefully often(!) — Y.

David Keyes

Unleashing Early Maturity Academic Innovations

How four prominent universities across the Arab region stimulate high-quality undergraduate research and innovation in computing.

Slim Abdennadher, Sherif G. Aly, Joe Tekli, Karima Echihabi

Connecting Arabs: Bridging the Gap in Dialectal Speech Recognition

Arabic poses a set of unique speech recognition challenges due to its rich dialectal variety.

Ahmed Ali, Shammur Chowdhury, Mohamed Afify, Wassim El-Hajj, Hazem Hajj, Mourad Abbas, Amir Hussein, Nada Ghneim, Mohammad Abushariah, Assal Alqudah

Biomedical Computing in the Arab World: Unlocking the Potential of a Growing Research Community

The biomedical computing research community in the Arab world has been actively contributing to efforts that tackle long-standing biomedical challenges.

Seif Eldawlatly, Mohamed Abouelhoda, Omar S. Al-Kadi, Takashi Gojobori, Boris Jankovic, Mohamad Khalil, Ahsan H. Khandoker, Ahmed Morsy

Everything VPN Is New Again

The 24-year-old security model has found a second wind.

David Crawshaw

Safe Systems Programming in Rust

The promise and the challenges of the first industry-supported language to master the trade-off between safety and control.

Ralf Jung, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Robbert Krebbers, Derek Dreyer

The (Im)possibility of Fairness: Different Value Systems Require Different Mechanisms For Fair Decision Making

What does it mean to be fair?

Sorelle A. Friedler, Carlos Scheidegger, Suresh Venkatasubramanian

Transformers Aftermath: Current Research and Rising Trends

Attention, particularly self-attention, is a standard in current NLP literature, but to achieve meaningful models, attention is not enough.

Eduardo Souza Dos Reis, Cristiano André Da Costa, Diórgenes Eugênio Da Silveira, Rodrigo Simon Bavaresco, Rodrigo Da Rosa Righi, Jorge Luis Victória Barbosa, Rodolfo Stoffel Antunes, Márcio Miguel Gomes, Gustavo Federizzi

Succinct Range Filters

We present the Succinct Range Filter (SuRF), a fast and compact data structure for approximate membership tests.

Huanchen Zhang, Hyeontaek Lim, Viktor Leis, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, Kimberly Keeton, Andrew Pavlo

Technical Perspective: The Strength of SuRF

The authors of "Succinct Range Filters" make a critical and insightful observation: For a given set of queries, the upper levels of the trie incur many more accesses than the lower levels. This results in a data structure that …

Stratos Idreos

Welcome

Over the last decade, the Arab world witnessed a significant investment in computer research and the corresponding enabling industry.

Sherif G. Aly, Mohamed Mokbel, Moustafa Youssef

Roulette Angel

Where will the ball drop when the spinning roulette wheel stops?

Dennis Shasha