Eleven students and recent graduates from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar worked hard for eight weeks during the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) 2013 summer internship program. Their efforts paid off, with Carnegie Mellon interns taking the top three awards in a poster competition in which they presented their projects to a panel of expert judges.

Hashim Moosavi (CS’14) and Mona Thowfeek, a recent graduate of Qatar University, took first place for their project evaluating optical character recognition systems for historic Arabic documents. Second place went to Abhay Valiyaveettil (IS’13) and Humaira Tasnim (IS’13), and third place to Fahim Dalvi (CS’14).

Twenty-two students interned at QCRI this summer—18 from universities in Qatar and four international students. The students teamed up with QCRI’s scientists and worked on 12 projects in areas including humanitarian computing, optical character recognition, speech translation for meetings, next-generation elastic databases, socio-graphic mapping, and biomarkers in diabetes.

Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, executive director of QCRI, described the importance of the program to Qatar Foundation’s research and development mission.

"At QCRI, we believe that it is essential for our country’s development to identify, teach and nurture students who are interested in, and have an aptitude for, science and research. Our summer internship program is designed to prepare these young students for such opportunities by having them work closely with our scientists to solve real computing challenges."

Interns from Carnegie Mellon were: Hashim Moosavi, Sidra Alam, Mohammad Sakib Mahmoud, Dareddy Manoj Rdeey, Maahd Shahzad, Fahim Imaduddin, Hanan Mohammed, Humaira Tasnim MD Abdurrashid, Abhay Valyaveettil, Tasneem Jahan Ahmed and Reham AlTememy.