28
Annual Report 2014-15
29
Kemal Oflazer, associate dean, research, teaching professor of computer science
Computer Science The Computer Science program at CMU-Q follows the curriculum of the main campus: a solid core of computer science coursework combined with a minor in a second subject to gain depth in another area of study. Since computing is a discipline with strong links to many fields, the minor requirement provides students with unparalleled flexibility.
Highlights Alice in the Middle East Saquib Razak, assistant teaching professor of computer science, continued his work introducing Alice into Qatar schools. Alice is educational software developed at Carnegie Mellon that teaches computer programming to school-aged children. The software was piloted in six schools in Qatar.
Alice in the Middle East software
CS4Qatar The Computer Science program has continued to increase awareness of computer science—a fundamental part of Qatar’s Vision 2030—among school-aged children. In addition to outreach talks at eight schools, faculty delivered workshops to more than two hundred students at CS4Qatar events. CS4Qatar and CS4Qatar for Women provide the opportunity for high school students to learn about computer science topics such as programming and computational thinking.
CS4Qatar, a hands-on workshop for high school students
Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) The Computer Science program has continued to collaborate with researchers from QCRI. Faculty members Iliano Cervesato, Khaled Harras, Kemal Oflazer and Thierry Sans have been engaged with QCRI in several projects on security, natural language processing, and multimedia content dissemination. Student honors thesis Sabih Bin Wasi, “SenTweet: Interactive, real-time Twitter sentiment analysis using machine learning models.”
Student accomplishments In the fifth annual Gulf Programming Contest, CMU-Q teams placed second and third. The second-place team included Naassih Gopee, Dilsher Ahmed and Zeeshan Hanif. The third-place team included Aliaa Essameldin, Qasim Nadeem and Zihan Zhou. Several seniors secured acceptances to graduate programs in prestigious schools such as Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University.