Meeting of the Minds takes place at the end of spring semester each year to give students the opportunity to present their research to faculty, fellow students and industry experts using posters, videos and visual aids. “The quality of the work is exceptional for undergraduates; it shows that faculty at Carnegie Mellon Qatar are doing a good job in mentoring these young minds,” said Stephan Vogel, principal scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute and a judge at the event.
“For example, one of the strongest features we had was ‘number of positive words.’ We compiled our list of positive words from many external sources and matched the words found in a tweet to this list. The choice of capitalizing on external resources mindfully and being cautious about feature selection was one of the critical factors for our system,” he said. Second place in this year’s Meeting of the Minds also went to Bin Wasi, who completed the project “Using Technology to Help People Save Food Effortlessly” with faculty advisor Thierry Sans. Third place went to “SNV-check: A Quality Control Tool for Familiar Exome Sequencing Data Based on the Sharing of Rare Genetic Mutations” by Noora Al-Muftah, a computational biology student, who worked with faculty advisor Khalid A. Fakhro from Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar.
Summer 2014 / Fall 2014
Judges at this year’s event came from Qatar Biobank, Qatar Ministry of Environment, Qatar Shell, Vodafone, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, PC DealNet, Aspire Zone Foundation, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Qatar University, ictQatar, Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), iHorizons, the Qatar Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics, and the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. On behalf of His Excellency Saleh bin Mohammad Al Nabit, Minister of Development Planning, Dr. Barak Yehya, an expert in institutional development at the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics, recognized projects that were closely aligned to Qatar’s National Development Strategy. Winners were: Fatima Al-Saygh, advisor Jonathan Finkel; Aniish Sridhar, advisor John Gasper; Kenrick Fernandes, advisor Divakaran Liginlal; Aliya Hashim, advisor Divakaran Liginlal; and Dania Abed Rabbou (post-graduate), advisor Mohammad Hammoud.
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