He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors. (Martin Heidegger)
وإنك لترى أن مصر هي حقاً أسُّ الدهر التاريخي، وأمُّ الدنيا، ورحم الحضارة الجليلة. فكل ما هو عالٍ ورفيع في تجربة الإنسان إنما جاء به السياق العالمي بعد ما مرَّ بالصباغ الفرعوني، بلون الفرعون العظيم، والد كل سياسة فارهة وثقافة كونية المنزع. (يوسف سامي اليوسف)
في مصر، إذن – لأول مرة في التاريخ – استيقظت الذات المنزهة منذ دهر لا يخضع لمقاييسنا. أيقظها الزمن الغفل لتوقظ الزمن الناجز. وقبل مصر كانت الكينونة البشرية عجراء، مثقلة بفجاجتها المعرقِلة لوثباتها الفتية. ومع مصر صار الإنسان – صار التاريخ – شاباً يانعاً مترفاً بمنجزات روحه. (يوسف سامي اليوسف)
لكنّي لاحظت بعد حين أن الحياة في الحاضر وحده، وفي الحديث الأحدث، هي، في مسائل الرّوح، حياة لا تطاق ولا معنى لها، وأنّ حياة الرّوح ليست ممكنة إلاّ بالرجوع المتواصل إلى ما هو ماض، إلى التّاريخ، إلى القديم والبدئي. (هيرمان هيسه)
I am currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, Alexandria, Egypt (on leave from the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University).
Current research:
My research lab focuses on the following research topics:
Scene understanding and automatic video surveillance for crowd scenes. Our recent publications are mainly concerned with the detection and classification of violent acts in public crowd scenes.
A wide range of aspects related to human activity recognition, where the analyses are based on inertial motion data streamed in real-time from Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) embedded on wearable devices such as smartphones, smartwatches, and specialized devices. Such analyses include:
Action detection and recognition.
Gender classification.
Age estimation.
Person identification and verification.
On-body location determination of the sensor.
We have done lyrics analysis using data analytics tools and applied them to the study of the lyrics of one of the most famous Egyptian and Arab singer during the 20th century, namely, Abdel Halim Hafez (عبد الحليم حافظ).
Past research:
Through fellowship grants from IBM, we have conducted work in the area of Intelligent Transportation Systems. We addressed the following points:
Developing a smart traffic control system for urban areas using a framework of multi-objective reinforcement learning. So, it is adaptive to the changing dynamics of traffic.
Developing a freeway ramp metering control based on the framework of reinforcement learning.
My subsequent work in theoretical computer science focused on the field of computable analysis, which is the integration of classical computability theory (over discrete structures) with mathematical analysis. It is the most tangible generalization of classical discrete computability to computation over more general metric and topological spaces.
During my PhD I used to work in the area of descriptive complexity theory which is concerned with the understanding of computational complexity classes through their logical descriptions in various types of logics.