Software Development

How will Qatar prepare for Information Overload?

We are neighbours, no matter where we live. Being a new resident to Doha, I am grappling with a number of questions. These stem from working with humanitarian and crisis information for a number of years. Plus, it is part of my mandate at Qatar Computing Research Institute to help apply research and software to support local needs. We have learned much globally about emergencies. I’d like to learn more about how to help locally and who is keen to collaborate.

How will Doha and Qatar prepare for the upcoming information overload? What are the communications plans during an emergency? How will the public use or not use social media or new technology during an emergency? What are the information and technology needs in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council)? How does preparedness compare to other regions? How can citizens and communities prepare? How can Digital Humanitarians be of service? How would Digital Humanitarian community in Qatar differ? What are the training and technology needs of digital humanitarians locally? How can the local Digital Humanitarian community get more involved in the global community? How would Qatar Computing Research Institute’s work apply or not apply for emergencies in the region? What other types of research and/or software would serve the local responders and communities?

In September I attended the GCC Government Social Media Summit in Dubai. There were a number of presentations about preparedness and communications. I was interested to learn that in Dubai, every neighbourhood has a #hashtag. It is used for community activities but my colleague Ali Rebaie advised that this practice is also used for emergencies or resilience. This is something that happens around the world. Neighbours online are networks and information ambassadors locally (offline). This is invaluable. How can we apply this to Doha? Maybe because we are a smaller city and country, we organize primarily around #Doha or #Qatar. There should be tags for all social media platforms in multiple languages by districts and cities. By doing this, we can plan and share for communications.

The Qatar Red Crescent Disaster Management Camp in April 2015 provided great insights into how communication flows among responders. My observations found that people use WhatsApp to organize but are keen to investigate how social media might also be a communications channel. This participation has provided an impetus and goal to host a local social media and emergency meetups. Bringing responders and local enterpreneurs into the same space has started with the joint QCRI and Qatar Red Crescent Digital Humanitarian workshops. But, we do need to talk more about how social media will or won’t be a factor in Doha. How will people communicate during an emergency? How will responders work with them? At minimum, there needs to be local ‘information ambassador’ programme setup on WhatsApp. The more training the more ready we are for emergencies. The Qatar Red Crescent has been doing preparedness and resilience training in communities and with schools. Businesses may be thinking about text messages (SMS) during emergencies. But as a new resident working in these spaces, I do see opportunities to help.

Civil Defense Exhibition and Conference is hosting preworkshops on preparedness, community risk reduction, evacuation and infrastructure planning. All week for 5 hours a night I have joined about 60 people to learn from experts in the field. Participants are from across emergency response, civil defense, business and research. Questions have been fascinating. The earnestness to plan for all the stakeholders is very evident. While the mandate was not about ‘how communities will communicate’, it is very much on the minds of organizers and participants. All of this highlights the need for a more research on how will responders and communities work together.

(Map presented by the Professor Zare of the International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology, IIEES (Tehran, Iran))

There is a large multilingual and high-volume mobile telephone penetration. I’ve found some success in building informal alliances and finding allies. In talking with many stakeholders, there is an enthusiasm to build more plans around communications and citizen engagement for preparedness. Who should I talk with who is interested in communications and emergencies in Doha, Qatar or the GCC?

24Aug

In their own words via Kasra

What does it take to be a successful local startup? If Nawaf Felemban, CEO of Kasra, is any measure the components are niche concept, vision, humility, technical acumen, mentorship and grit. Tonight Nawaf will be sharing some lessons at Doha Tweetups for their event feature on startups.

Kasra is a user-driven content site and community network focused on a myriad of topics ranging from fashion to technology. All the articles are created by a growing community of writers for each other in their own voice. Translation for non-arabic speakers like me: Kasra is the accent symbol in the Arabic language and means “break”. This speaks to their mission – get people comfortable and, dare I say, enthusiastic with sharing a wide range of community and user-driven content in Arabic. It is a “break” from the formal use of Arabic infusing every day people’s content of their own interest and own voice. All the content is in pan-Arabic neutral language to serve all the various dialects across the region.

What’s Under the Hood

Kasra was spun up with a minimal viable product (MVP) with a launch in May 2014. The goal to test out the idea was proven viable from the outset with 1000 Facebook followers within hours. Now their imprint is a over 1 million unique views per month (metric over 6 months). Add to this: They are the fastest growing website in the Arabic speaking world. Considering that the online market segment is 150 million people, they are in front of some serious opportunity to grow.

For technology, they started out with a WordPress site, but are currently building out the next version. The newer shiny Kasra is being built with node.js, react.js, Mongo db. They choose this platform for the (java script framework, optimized for asynconryous and scaleability )

A strong plan about social analytics and engagement are to their ongoing success. They have a number of tools and tactics in their toolkit. Nawaf suggests that startups use, at minimum, Twitter insights and Facebook Analytics. These engagement As Nawaf points out, basic tools like these plus big data tools for your customer usage tools will help measure reach and reveal strategic next steps.

Growing Talent

Kasra is growing talent within the community. By fostering a space to create compelling content, they are encouraging their contributors to become great writers and share best practices. They want to inspire the next generation of writers to share articles (even long form version) across the Arabic-speaking world.

Nawaf is building a strong team ethos by encouraging staff to take a leadership role in the industry while inspiring others around them to learn. Their strategy is two-fold: attract top talent and foster local talent. He said there is a gap with technical skills so while they focus on building their technical skills, they want to give back to others. Mentorship and community are core to the Kasra backbone. There is a gap of mentorship in the region. While he has located this for himself, 90 % of local entrepreneurs need the help. They need mentorship from people with actual entrepreneurship experience not just theoretical.

Here’s to seeing more startups learning from each other. Thanks Kasra for sharing your story about making it happen step by step.

2Jul

Your Next Job could be with QCRI’s Social Computing team

Feeding curiosity and delivering excellence is of utmost importance at Qatar Computing Research Institute. With top research scientists, software engineers and program technologists, QCRI has the pulse of an entrepreneurship environment with the heart of scientific rigor. Computer vision, UAV image processing, social media analysis, wearables, big data and cybersecurity are just some of the topics that teams tackle.

We’re hiring for multiple positions across: Social Computing, Data Analytics, CyberSecurity, Arabic Language Technologies, Distributed Systems, and Computational Science and Engineering.

Start your future here.

Definitely Social

In November 2014, I joined the Social Computing team. It has been a fast paced adventure to learn about all the research projects and formulate programs to foster Social Innovation in Qatar. Often I joke that my role is to add baking soda to research. The opportunity to connect research, entrepreneurship and technology for social good feeds my mind and soul. We are seeking research scientists, software engineers and even post-doctoral students to maintain our momentum. I’ve added two active descriptions. Won’t you join us? Please do ask me questions. And, share with your networks.

Social Computing group researches and builds programmes for: (1) mining social media for sociopolitical, cultural, and behavioral patterns, (2) social media intelligence for news and (3) extracting timely and credible information from social media for crisis response. We incorporate the cross-cutting Social Innovation initiatives which includes research and programmes on resilient cities, humanitarian software, digital humanitarians and youth engagement.

Active Social Computing Roles

Research Scientist

The Principal Scientist is a senior departmental leader within QCRI who is responsible for leading and conducting scientific research work. The Principal Scientist will have primary responsibility for defining the methodology for conducting research and for evaluating research results in order to ensure the highest standards of practice and research quality, while aligning research activities with QCRI’s mission and vision. The Principal Scientist will also possess a strong background in computational social science, behavior mining, visualization, text mining, data mining, machine learning, data management, or information retrieval.

Software Engineer

Experience in the development of data-intensive applications involving the processing of large datasets is required.

Experience dealing with blogs/micro-blogs and other user generated contents is required.
Fluency in Java and at least one scripting language (e.g. Perl, PHP, Ruby or Python) is required.
Familiarity with data mining and/or data warehousing, technologies, a plus.
Relational database experience required, MySQL a plus.
NoSQL database experience required, Redis or Cassandra, a plus.
Experience applying Machine Learning or Natural Language Processing methods, a plus.
Strong communication and collaboration skills; must be fluent in English.

Rank and compensation will be commensurate with experience. Please apply via the QCRI website.

18May

Socioscope, like a telescope

We observe all the rapid fire social media content, but really don’t get much of a chance to see the big picture. All observational sciences need tools to, well, observe. As an example, breakthroughs in astronomy depend on ever bigger and better telescopes. Studying cell biology was impossible before the development of microscopes. The social sciences have, however, so far lacked similar instruments and were limited to smaller scale behavioral studies, often in artificial laboratory settings. Recently, through the advent of social media in general and Twitter in particular this has changed. Now social scientists finally have their “socioscope” and can study the behavior of millions of people at the click of a button.

Yelena Mejova and Ingmar Weber, Qatar Computing Research Institute colleagues, are co-editors of the new book with Michael Macy: Twitter: A Digital Socioscope. I asked them a few questions to learn more about their observations and research:

What inspires you about researching Twitter and social media data?

Ingmar: I’m always amazed by how rich a data source Twitter is. Though social media definitely does not represent the whole population and though there are definitely data quality issues, numerous studies have found robust and consistent links between chatter on Twitter and quantitative real world indicators. Studying this link between the physical world and the online world lies at the heart of my research and is also at the core of our book.

Yelena: The combination of mundane and sophisticated content on Twitter allows for a great variety in possible studies. On one side it is a space for discussion of political and community issues, while on the other the everyday life updates allow us to glimpse the diets, health, and mood of populations at scales unprecedented in social studies.

Can you share some of your core observations regarding the themes of your new book?

Ingmar: The overarching observation is that Twitter data can indeed provide meaningful insights about the real world. Applications range from tracking disease outbreaks to predicting the stock price. Each chapter provides a number of cases to demonstrate the feasibility, but also to question how reliable the derived information really is. For example, when it comes to tracking public opinion, caution is advised and Twitter might not be the preferred medium to analyze. Generally, in areas where one would expect the discussion to be dominated by pundits, commercial entities or by spammers extra care is needed before jumping to any conclusions because of certain trends on Twitter.

Yelena: Indeed, the chapters are written by the experts in their area, who describe the best tools for their aims, but also outline the shortcomings of the data and potential ways to overcome them. The most important observation for me is, despite the new tools and techie jargon, the methods of proper sampling, statistical analysis, and data quality checks developed throughout the social sciences are what make big data analysis a science.

What are you currently researching?

Ingmar & Yelena: We are currently looking at how to use social media data to study both public and individual health. More specifically, we are looking at how to combine data from social media with data obtained through mobile sensors, such as pedometers, to develop personalized and culturally aware interventions. Here in Qatar, changes in lifestyle have led to an explosion in obesity rates. At the same time, most of the research that looks at how to motivate people to live a healthier life considers only Western countries. We believe that the widespread use of social media such as Instagram could provide us with a tool to both gather data and advocate behavioral changes.

What can you recommend for students and data scientists to get started in this field?

Yelena: Because of the availability of both open-source tools and public data APIs, one really learns data science by “doing it”. Start with a simple question, gather data, apply algorithm, examine output, iterate. Every step helps you learn the tools of the trade, spurs more questions, and provides ground for further conversation with collaborators.

Ingmar: I think strong quantitative skills are a good foundation. This includes hands-on experience in data collection and analysis, but also in statistics and machine learning. At the same time, research in Computational Social Science is of a very interdisciplinary nature. So I’d encourage anybody to try and attend talks from other domains and to talk to experts in the humanities. Without having domain expertise on the research team it is less likely to provide new insights and it will be very hard to have actual impact.

Buy their book here to learn more! (This is my upcoming weekend read.)

About Yelena and Ingmar

Yelena Mejova (@yelenamm) is a scientist in the Social Computing Group at Qatar Computing Research Institute. Specializing in text retrieval and mining, Yelena is interested in building tools for tracking real-life social phenomena in social media. Her work on sentiment classification and evaluation, as well as political opinion tracking and poll now-casting has appeared in international computer and web science conferences such as ICWSM, WebSci and WSDM, and she is a co-editor of a Social Science Computing Review special issue on “Quantifying Politics Using Online Data”.

Ingmar Weber (@ingmarweber) is a senior scientist in the Social Computing group at Qatar Computing Research Institute. In his research, he uses large amounts of online data from Twitter and other sources to study phenomena that affect society at large. Recent work has looked at political polarization in Egypt, at global gender inequality in online social networks, at international migration, at relationship breakups, and at food consumption and obesity seen through social media. His research is frequently featured in popular press such as the Washington Post, Forbes, NewScientist, Financial Times, or Foreign Policy.

14May

Using your Voice to Amplify your Career

Mentoring is one of the most rewarding experiences in my career. Over the years, I have learned from mentors many skills on how to build my network, develop my skills, speak publicly and find my voice. Today I had the opportunity to share my experiences with the Qatar Computing Research Institute‘s Summer Interns. I am very thankful to my teachers and mentors for guiding me. Certainly as a mentee and mentor, I consider it a goal to be a lifelong learner. Do you have tips and ideas about amplifying your career? I’d love to learn from you.

Here are the slides with notes, articles, tools and techniques that might help you:

10May

Welcome QCRI Summer Interns

Remember when you were a student? As a library studies student, I recall this unique combination of overwhelmed excitement and earnest curiousity. Now, it is a pleasure to give back. Working and living in Qatar adds special dimension: everywhere you turn there is a priority focus on education. This is even more supercharged as I work at Qatar Foundation with the Qatar Computing Research Institute.

Summer is here and today was the first day of the QCRI Summer Internship program. Dr. Eman Al Fituri, QCRI’s Director of Education Initiatives, inspired students from many local universities to join the internships offered across the various divisions. The program is in its 4th year and has doubled in size of applicants and participants. My team at Social Computing has 14 students working including such diverse research topics from wearable eye tracking to twitter trends in the MENA region, show me healthy food in Qatar via Instagram, Summarizing the Perception of Qatar on Twitter, Mobile/wearable health sensing and interaction, and Political tweets in MENA countries. And, the Social Innovation team welcomes our Sysadmin intern. Over the course of the internship, I will highlight the amazing students and research outputs.

Each of us is focused on the learning journey for the students. Being a teacher and mentor is so rewarding on both parts of the engagement. We are delighted to contribute to the mission of QCRI and Qatar Foundation to build local technical capacity. Often I joke that I am here in Qatar to deliver Social Innovation programs and find a local leader to replace me someday. On a personal note, it has been very rewarding to work with the QCRI Social Computing team to review and coordinate the internship program. For the summer, I will be coaching and mentoring on presentation and career development.

So, welcome student interns: you are our teachers and the future!

24Apr

Board Announcements: PeaceGeeks and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

The journey to grow digital technology communities has taken a number of forms in my career. I’ve had the great pleasure to work with some amazing leaders, partners and communities both in a professional and volunteer capacity. I am pleased to share that I have been re-elected to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Board of Directors (3rd year) with the role of President of the Board and elected to the PeaceGeeks Board of Directors (1st year). These map and technical communities are part of a larger Digital Humanitarian Network. For both boards, my priorities are strategy,fundraising and community building. I look forward to helping both organizations and communities grow their missions while supporting the beautiful engagement of helping people make a technical difference in this great world.

About Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team [HOT] applies the principles of open source and open data sharing for humanitarian response and economic development.

This is my 3rd year as a member of the HOT Board. As a crisismapper and digital humanitarian, HOT is really a community home for me. I remain in awe of HOT’s potential. The community membership and board have honoured me with the role of President of HOT. As mentioned in my candidate statement, I see this as a critical year for HOT to grow local communities and build infrastructure to support organizational development. The community is so inspiring. This results in my contributing volunteer time beyond the suggested five – ten hours a month. In the coming months, I will speak at the State of the Map – US about “Your Neighbour is Mapping” with my colleague from Medicine Sans Frontieres. We aim to share some thoughts on implementation of local communities.

The HOT Board position is elected by the community membership.

To learn more about HOT, see our wiki page.

About PeaceGeeks

PeaceGeeks empowers grassroots organizations by building technology partnerships to significantly improve or transform their efforts to promote peace and human rights in developing and conflict-affected areas. We see a world where every NGO can leverage technology to achieve lasting peace.

I’m most excited about PeaceGeek’s mission to work with small local NGOs on long-term sustainable projects. They aim to connect the global community to the local one stitching together offline and online techniques. There is so much potential to connect technical company corporate social responsibility programmes to PeaceGeeks’ wider network. Stay tuned as I learn more about PeaceGeeks and explore how I can connect them.

The Board of Director’s position is elected. I had a number of interviews by the team to be sure it was a good fit.

23Apr

Convening Innovation Allies

How can we use advanced computing, human computing and social innovation to have impact in Qatar? Healthy lives, taking care of the environmental, youth engagement, resilient cities, social entrepreneurship and humanitarian response are some of the core Social Computing research activities at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI)?

On Wednesday, April 15, 2015, QCRI hosted a small forum to discuss social innovation in Qatar. The session consisted of speakers from QCRI and partners as well as some informal discussion groups. Thank you for our guests and participants for this informative conversation.

The Qatar Red Crescent Disaster Management Camp was held in Doha, Qatar from March 31 – April 9, 2015. These are some early observations that I had on the use of technology and the opportunities for future research and collaboration:

Report from the Qatar Red Crescent Disaster Management Camp from Heather Leson

We plan on expanding this dialogue in the future. Until then, your insights will inform both our strategic planning, research agenda and future activity collaborations.

QCRI’s Social Innovation Programme in Qatar is focused on four streams of research and activities:

Smart and Resilient Cities
Remote Sensing for Social Good
Digital Humanitarians
Social Media for Disaster

In the Resilient city discussion group we saw some opportunities with ICTQatar leading open data initiatives, QMIC working with traffic sensor data and the potential of sports data to provide insights into society. Collectively we agreed that we need to know more about resilience city and society ecosystems in Qatar. Some of the barriers included lack of policy and regulation in Qatar, community services need access to the data and
cellular data is hard to share.

The Remote Sensing group spent time thinking about blue sky uses for these tools and techniques. Some of the concepts tie directly into the Resilient City Group with opportunities to use phone traffic sensors, computer vision and drones and uavs for parking. Some of the potential imagery sources include landsat imagery, Planet Labs and Skybox (Google).

The Social Media for Disaster and Digital Humanitarian teams joined forces to delve into opportunities, barriers and new research items. Opportunities included a very diverse community (languages, cultures), engaged youth, access to technology/mobile devices and the sense of belonging in a geographically small but strategic area. The barriers include lack of civil society, language barriers, education levels and the fluidity of communities. Also, there is a need to reframe the concept of volunteering into opportunities for educational and society advancement. Research opportunities included understanding the needs/motivations of people, peer-to-peer transfer of knowledge, community development in Qatar and understanding social responsibility programs in Qatar.

Thanks again to the speakers, guests and my colleagues for a great morning.

3Apr

Dispatch: Qatar Red Crescent Disaster Management Camp

On behalf of Qatar Computing Research Institute, I have the honour to be a guest trainer at the 6th Annual Qatar Red Crescent Disaster Management Camp. This 10-day event (March 31 – April 9, 2015) includes training, scenarios and humanitarian keynotes. Participants are from all over the MENA region including students, staff of the QRCS, partner Red Crescent members, UNHCR, IFRC, ICRC, civil defense (various) and special guests.

Over 6 days, I will train small groups on social media, new technology, digital humanitarians and how QCRI is working to make a difference. These slides contain my talking points and extensive notes. As the camp is in Arabic, Ali Moustafa El-Sebai El Gamal of QRCS provided translation. Together we are providing an interactive session. Yesterday due to the sandstorm, there was a power outage. This is a perfect example of always be prepared. I delivered the training without slides. Truly it is always fun to train folks, but it is especially powerful to collaborate with humanitarians. This is my first full Disaster Management Camp. I’ve participated in many digital simulations but this is a great way to learn and share.

Learning by doing

The second reason that I am at Disaster Management Camp is to analyze how participants and staff use software and social media. At QCRI, we are very interested in taking the lessons we learn internationally and supporting Qatar. The Qatar Red Crescent team has been very welcoming. Over the coming months, I will be sharing my embedded research outputs.

Meta Level action

I’m a digital storyteller. Every event, I curate photos, quick vignettes and try to capture the mission and spirit. Together with my colleagues we are using Storify:

Thanks again to Qatar Red Crescent Society for the kind support of Qatar Computing Research Institute.

(photo credit: Amara-photos.com)

30Mar

In Doha: Internet of Things and Smart Cities

Construction, traffic and weather – these are the main topics that people talk about in Doha. All around there is this a massive pulse of change accompanied by many threads of activity. Resilience and knowledge economy are fed by this energy of bright minds congregating on this big shift plain.
Cities around the world are preparing their smart city or Internet of Things (#IoT) policies and practices. Doha is on this same journey. Cities that create together breathe.

ictQatar hosts #IoT and Smart Cities event

Humans connected to machines, machines connected to humans. It often seems like such a far off concept. But the convergence of the Internet of Things (Web of Things) and Smart Cities is creating a space where the data bits and the human bits become parts of the big data analytical questions. Layering citizen data (citizen sensing) with open data or sensor data is really the next level of social innovation. We want to interact and make sense of our environment and make decisions about how the space can or should be used.

ictQatar hosted an event last night: Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities.

ictQatar connects people to the technologies that enrich their lives, drive economic development & inspire confidence in the future.

Dr. Elyes Ben Hamida from Qatar Mobility Innovation Center (QMIC) spoke with the community on the topic of Internet of Things (IoT). How can we which is build a future where every day physical objects will be connected to the Internet and be able to identify themselves to other devices. At QMIC, they have created a product, Labeeb – an intelligent sensing and M2M services platform. During the Q&A period, there were some great questions about how can this research and the tools or datasets be activated to spur new entrepreneurship. Music to my eyes. While IOT may not be the first concept that comes to your mind when you think about Doha, what this talk demonstrated for me is that same undercurrent I encounter all around town. People want to dig into the data and activate it. They want to start businesses and gain a sense of play. While Labeeb is a closed system, there are many opportunities with IoT (Web of Things) can become part of Doha’s entrepreneurship story.

Doha was listed #41 on the Sustainable Cities Index. This is a call to action for the citizens and creatives of Doha. While government bodies like ictQatar work on the policies and negotiate the murky waters of trying to implement projects with few local context examples, there is this burgeoning undercurrent of people who want to capitalize and innovate using the doors that open with the dialogue of Smart Cities. Mr. Ahmed Hefnawi from the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology presented the basics of smart cities including how “information technology is the principal infrastructure and the basis for providing essential services to residents.” There are a number of business and governmental initiatives around Smart Cities in Doha. The biggest take away I took form this was how small businesses and entrepreneurs could also be part of the solution. A few of the attendees inquired about how they could get more involved or how they could access the Open Data of Qatar to build apps or programmes. Step by step.

*******
All of this brings me to the key point: Every day Doha surprises me with the collective drive to the future. There are big ideas activating Doha. While my new home may only be #41 on the Sustainable Cities Index, but I expect that the progression is changing. The Social Innovation programme at QCRI is keen to use research social computing for Resilient Cities. We are keen to see how we can focus on Doha. Already, colleagues are digging into Traffic data.

Thanks to Julia Astashkina of ictQatar for an engaging night.

(Photo: Doha Skyline from Katara on a Dhow (November 2014))

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