Six graduate students from Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s (HBKU) College of Science and Engineering (CSE) received awards from the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), as part of the Graduate Student Research Award programme.
With the funding, the master’s and doctoral students will undertake projects in sustainable energy and environment, data science, the biomedical sciences and computer science. Four of the awardees are PhD and the other two are master’s students.
The Graduate Student Research Award is presented under QNRF’s Qatar Research Leadership Programme, which supports outstanding graduate students with scholarships. The awards will add to HBKU’s growing research portfolio, under which 80 different research projects are currently being pursued.
Dr Mounir Hamdi, dean CSE, commented: “I congratulate the awardees and wish the students all the best in their studies. As a research intensive university, we are consistently and diligently committed to creating a rigorous academic culture. Our researchers are constantly working on breakthrough discoveries and innovations.”
“Together with my colleagues across HBKU, I feel inspired to remain steadfast in our mission to contribute towards Qatar’s knowledge-based economy, and these achievements make it all possible,” Dr Hamdi added.
One of the winners of the grants, Aboubakr Aqle is a doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering. Aqle has been awarded for his work on data-driven text summarisation technologies. His research focuses on analysing large amounts of data, to draw patterns for text summarisation, touching on key computer science fields like web accessibility, UI/UX design, information and knowledge engineering, meta-search engine development, natural language processing and sentiment analysis.
His work, supported by the grant, seeks to make significant impact on how users consume text online, and optimise summarisation in text consumption, especially for content consumers who are visually impaired.
Aqle said: “HBKU suits my research interests because of its advanced academic study-plan and excellent research groups that are available at Qatar Computing Research Institute. I consider HBKU to be my best option, serving as an ideal environment in pursuing my goals, while, at the same time, maintaining the ability to gain different experiences in the education field, as well as the industrial field.”
