Omar Khattab, who graduated with a degree in computer science on May 6, has been named the winner of the Alumni Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Computer Science by the School of Computer Science. The award was given for Khattab’s senior thesis, titled “IRg: A distributed graph-based framework for information retrieval,” which he completed under the mentorship of Mohammad Hammoud, assistant professor of computer science at CMU-Q.
Established in 2003, the award recognizes technical excellence in research and development by a graduating senior who participated in the thesis research program at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science.
The CMU School of Computer Science is widely recognized as one of the first and best computer science programs in the world.
Khattab also won the Best Project award and the Qatar National Research Fund award at the CMU-Q Meeting of the Minds 2019 symposium in April 2019.
The research project developed a novel framework that makes it easier and more efficient for information retrieval experts to develop and deploy scalable search engines. Large-scale information retrieval is central to many applications like web and e-commerce searches.
Khattab joins Noura El-Moughny (CS 2008) and Hatem Al-Ismael (CS 2009) as the third CMU-Q graduate to win a School of Computer Science undergraduate research award.
