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What is TREC? TREC is a reputable international evaluation conference in the field of Information Retrieval (the field behind the search engines, e.g., Google) that aims at providing a platform for evaluating retrieval systems over hot research problems in the field. The conference is organized yearly by an American institute called NIST, and typically offers eight to ten research tracks in which international research teams can participate. Each track in the conference defines one or more research problems (called tasks) that are related. This year, our team participated in two tasks in the “Real-time Summarization” track. The goal of the track is to build a system that runs in real-time and monitors the live stream of tweets. The user of the system describes a topic of interest (such as “Qatar national day”) and the system notifies the user whenever a tweet that is relevant to the given topic and contains relatively-new information about it is posted. The system pushes those tweets to the mobile of the user whenever possible (push notification task) or sends an email of all interesting tweets to the user at the end of the day (email digest task). It ran continuously for 10 days given more than 50 test topics of interest. The system output was eventually judged accurately by NIST and all participating systems were scored. The scores were communicated earlier to the individual teams, but the rankings were only announced at the conference, which was held from Nov 15 to Nov 18 at Maryland, USA. Our team adopted a simple yet scalable and effective approach to solve the problem and got the best results among the results of all automatic systems that participated in the first task. Our system was very conservative in pushing interesting tweets, which we believe was a major factor in improving the performance. QU Team Over the four years, our research group participated in two different tracks and five different tasks. The teams included 5 MSc students (Latifa Al-Marri, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, Rahma Ali, and Abdelrahman Shouman), 2 PhD students (Maram Hasanain and Rana Malhas), and a PostDoc (Dr. Marwan Torki). All students are CSE students. This year, our team who was ranked first consisted of two CSE graduate students: Maram Hasanain and Reem Suwaileh. Maram Hasanain is a secondyear Computer Science PhD student. She got her BSc degree in Computer Engineering in 2012 with the first rank in the department, and got her MSc in Computing degree in 2014 with Distinction (as the first student in the history of the College of Engineering to get her thesis accepted without modifications). She has been selected among only 80 firstyear PhD students worldwide to attend the Microsoft Research summer school at Cambridge, UK in 2015. She also got the best paper award in AIRS 2015 conference and was a Dr. Tamer El-Sayed Eng. Maram Hasanain
permanent member of our TREC team since 2013. Maram has published more than 10 research papers in reputable conferences in the field. She is currently a research assistant working on an NPRP project funded by QNRF. Reem Suwaileh is a second-year MSc in Computing student. She got her BSc degree in Computer Science in 2014. She is a member of our TREC team since 2015 and has published two conference papers in reputable conferences in the field. . Reem is currently a research assistant working on an NPRP project funded by QNRF. Maram is currently working on preparing her PhD thesis proposal. While she is not yet settled on the specific research problem, she thinks that the work she did for TREC will surely help her shape the idea of her PhD dissertation. She said that “it was a great honor to participate in a world class competition like TREC. It helped me learn how to work under pressure and as an active player in a software development team. I got to interact with world-class researchers from around the world, which provided an excellent source of ideas. I also got encouraged to get my hands dirty and attempt to develop systems from scratch to solve different problems while also providing me with the data and tools to evaluate the systems and improve them. Eventually, systems I developed were the core for my MSc thesis work. As I participated in TREC for 4 years, I managed to work on several information retrieval problems which broadened my understanding of my field and my own interests in problems from the field. My experience with TREC made me realize that many graduate students can benefit from such setting. It can help them get hands-on experience in working on problems from their field. Moreover, a conference like TREC allows us, graduate students, to get such experience while providing enough motivation (by its design as a competition) to compete at a world-class level. As a PhD student, I think that we should not be discouraged to work on different problems in our fields, as this can be a great source of ideas and a great way to improve our system development and research skills.” On the contrary, Reem has made her mind already and will continue working on realtime summarization as her MSc thesis topic. She is currently conducting more experiments and planning to start writing her thesis early next semester. She said that “we wanted to prove to ourselves that, if we are dedicated to our goals, we are capable of achieving the best results in the top evaluation conference in the field. That was the major benefit of our participation in such prestigious venue. We actually lose nothing by participating but we gain a lot, as TREC provides us the opportunity, not only to challenge ourselves to solve real problems and test our ideas on a ready testbed but also to compare our solutions with the solutions of the pioneers in the field. Additionally, participation in TREC helped me explore the field and its focused areas, which benefited me in determining the interest and area of my thesis work. Most importantly, I realized that “simplicity” always wins; participating in a highclass competition does not always require fancy or complex ideas, but using the intuition we gain out of experiments can lead to surprisingly-good solutions.”
Page 1 and 2: December 2016
Page 3 and 4: MESSAGE FROM THE HEAD OF THE DEPART
Page 5: CSE DEPT. ACHIEVEMENTS QU at TREC .
Page 9 and 10: CSE DEPT. ACHIEVEMENTS Following th
Page 11 and 12: CSE DEPT. INNOVATIONS Qatar Univers
Page 13 and 14: CMPS 497 - Special Topics in Data S
Page 15 and 16: Ethical Hacking Awards Ceremony The
Page 17 and 18: QU Computing Contest 2016 The Depar
Page 19: Research title: Low Power Reconfigu
Page 22 and 23: Dr. Ryan Rily celebrated his promot
Page 24 and 25: Twitter account of the issue: @qatn
Page 26: cs@qu.edu.qa +974-4403-4240 CSE@QU

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