Awards & Achievements

Our team member Maram Hasanain has successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled “Background Linking of News Articles” and got her degree *without modifications* for the fifth time within our group!

Fourth PhD Graduate of bigIR with Distinction (Fatima Haouari, May 2024)

Our team member Maram Hasanain has successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled “Retrieval of Authorities and Their Evidence for Rumor Verification in Arabic Social Media” and got her degree *without modifications* for the fourth time within our group!

Outstanding Reviewer Award at ECIR 2024 (Tamer Elsayed, Fatima Haouari, Mar 2024)

Dr. Tamer Elsayed and our group member Fatima Haouari have both received “Outstanding Reviewer Award” at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’24).

CENG Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research 2023 (Tamer Elsayed, May 2023)

Dr. Tamer Elsayed has received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research from College of Engineering, Qatar University.

Third PhD Graduate of bigIR with Distinction (Reem Suwaileh, May 2023)

Our team member Maram Hasanain has successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled “Location Mention Prediction from Disaster Tweets” and got her degree *without modifications* for the third time within our group!

Second PhD Graduate of bigIR with Distinction (Rana Malhas, Nov 2022)

Our team member Maram Hasanain has successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled “Arabic Question Answering on the Holy Qur'an” and got her degree *without modifications* for the second time within our group!

First PhD Graduate of bigIR with Distinction (Maram Hasanain, May 2022)

Our team member Maram Hasanain has successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled “Enabling Effective Arabic Information Retrieval on the Web and Social Media” and got her degree *without modifications* for the first time within our group! Examination committee included Prof. Iadh Ounis, Prof. Abdelaziz Bouras, and Dr. Abdelkarim Erradi.

New NPRP research grant Awarded about “Dimension-Specific Automated Scoring of Arabic Language Writing Proficiency” (April, 2022)

Dr. Tamer Elsayed's submitted NPRP proposal titled “Dimension-Specific Automated Scoring of Arabic Language Writing Proficiency” has been accepted to be funded by QNRF for a new 3-year grant. The project is in collaboration with Dr. Houda Bouamor (Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar) and Dr. Walid Masoud (Qatar University).

Best Reviewer Award at CIKM 2021 (Tamer Elsayed, Nov 2021)

Dr. Tamer Elsayed has received a "Best Reviewer Award" at the prestigious CIKM 2021 international conference. The award was announced during the conference that was held online this year. The award was given to 30 reviewers out of more than 1,600 reviewers, according to the General Chairs of the conference.

Best Paper Award at WANLP 2021 (Fatima Haouari, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, Tamer Elsayed, April 2021)

Our research team received the "Best Paper Award" at the Workshop on Arabic NLP (WANLP) 2021 on the paper titles "ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection". The paper is coauthored by Fatima Haouari, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, and Tamer Elsayed.

Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award at ECIR 2021 (Marwa Essam, April 2021)

Our team member Marwa Essam was awarded the "Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award" at ECIR 2021, with her proposal titled "Background Linking for News Articles".

Third MSc with Distinction in our group (Sara Al-Rasbi, Dec 2019)

Our team member Sara Al-Rasbi has successfully defended her MSc thesis titled “SparkIR: A Scalable Distributed Information Retrieval Engine over Spark.” and got her degree *with Distinction* for the third time within our group! Examination committee included Prof. Omar Bossaid and Dr. Aiman Erbad.

Ranked 2nd at TREC News Track 2019 (Nov 2019)

Our bigIR team led by PhD student Marwa Essam has been ranked 2nd among 9 international research teams in the News Track at TREC 2019! Congratulations to Marwa, who participated for the first time in TREC, for this big achievement!

Marwa addressed the problem of finding background articles that can help news readers conceptualize the story of a given news article with more knowledge. To tackle this problem, she used graph-based analysis techniques to extract influential keywords from the given article that eventually form a search query to retrieve background articles. More on that in our TREC 2019 paper.

GSRA Research Grant Awarded (Fatima Haouari, Aug 2019)

Our group member and PhD student Fatima Haouari has been awarded GSRA research grant funding from QNRF for her PhD study at Qatar University.

New NPRP research grant Awarded about “Fake News Detection” (Nov, 2018)

Dr. Tamer Elsayed's submitted NPRP proposal titled “Early Detection of Fake News over Arabic Social Media” has been accepted to be funded by QNRF for a new 3-year grant. The project is in collaboration with Dr. Walid Magdy (University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Abdelaziz AlAli (QU) and supported by Al Jazeera Network.

GSRA Research Grant Awarded (Reem Suwaileh, Aug 2018)

Our group member and PhD student Reem Suwaileh has been awarded GSRA research grant funding from QNRF for her PhD study at Qatar University.

Second MSc with Distinction in our group (Reem Suwaileh, June 2018)

Our team member Reem Suwaileh has successfully defended her MSc thesis titled “On the Relevance Filtering for Real-time Summarization” and got her degree *with Distinction* (with consensus of all members of the examination committee) for the second time within our group! This happens rarely in the College of Engineering at Qatar University! Examination committee included Prof. Ali Jaoua (QU), Dr. Abdelkarim Erradi (QU), and Prof. Fazly Can (Bilkent University).

CSE Excellence in Services Award (Tamer Elsayed, 2017/2018)

Dr. Tamer Elsayed has received the Excellence in Services award from Computer Science and Engineering Dept. at Qatar University for the academic year 2017/2018.

Maram Hasanain: SIGIR Student Liaison (June, 2017)

Our team member Maram Hasanain has been selected as SIGIR Student Liaison (for the Middle East region) among only 6 students worldwide. The goal is to make sure SIGIR students have the best network for their future career, by better engaging with the IR student community through student representatives. The liaisons will seek to support students by organizing social events at conferences, helping students network and gathering feedback through student specific forums to aid the SIGIR community as a whole.

bigIR students Win Best 3 Posters at Women in Data Science (WiDS) in Qatar Event (Feb, 2017)

Our team members Reem Suwaileh, Maram Hasanain, and Hend Almerekhi won the first , first-repeated, and third places in the poster session organized at Women in Data Science (WiDS) in Qatar event held at HBKU. Congratulations to the entire bigIR team!

Maram Hasanain: SIGIR Ambassador at ACM Turing Award 50-Years Celebration (Dec, 2016)

Our member Maram Hasanain has been selected among 10 students from all over the world to represent ACM SIGIR at the 50-Years Celebration of the ACM Turing Award (often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”) which will be held in June 2017 at San Francisco, California (https://www.acm.org/turing-award-50)!

Maram has been awarded a travel grant to attend the event as an ACM SIGIR ambassador. In her selection letter, the ACM SIGIR Chair has indicated that Maram’s specific attributes and experiences make her uniquely qualified to represent SIGIR at that prestigious event!

bigIR team achieved a historic 1st rank at TREC 2016 (Nov, 2016)

Our bigIR (representing QU) team has been ranked first at TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) 2016 international research competition in the “Real-time Summarization” track (mobile notification task) among 19 research teams (who have participated with automatic systems) from all over the world (see a list of teams below). This is the first time in the history of this prestigious conference (which is celebrating the 25th anniversary this year) for an Arab Muslim team to be ranked first in any of the tracks. Among the participating teams are 2 teams from University of Waterloo (Canada) and 2 teams from University of Maryland (US).

QU team includes Reem Suwaileh (MSc student) and Maram Hasanain (PhD student), besides me. The results were just announced yesterday at the conference being held at the US this week.

The same QU team has been also ranked 2nd among 15 research teams at another task (Email Digest) within the same track! Moreover, another QU team (including Rana Malhas (PhD student), Marwan Torki (PostDoc), and Rahma Ali (RA), and Dr. Tamer Elsayed) has been ranked 4th among 16 research teams at the “Live Question Answering” track. Both were also impressive rankings.

Participating teams (Real-time Summarization, Push Notification Scenario):

University of Waterloo (Clarke group), Canada
University of Waterloo (Lin group), Canada
Beijing University of Technology, China
NLP Lab, Central China Normal U., China
IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse), France
CLIP Lab, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, IndiaHeilongjiang Institute of Technology, China
Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication, India
Indian Statistical Institute (Kolkata), India
Social Network Analysis Lab, School of Computer, NUDT (National University of Defense Technology), China
Peking University, China
Philips Research North America, USA
Qatar University, Qatar
Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia
University of Delaware (Carterette group), USA
InfoLab @ University of Delaware, USA
Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Best Paper Award at HComp 2016

Our team got best paper award at the 4th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2016) for the paper titled “Why Is That Relevant? Collecting Annotator Rationales for Relevance Judgments” co-authored with Tyler McDonnell, Matt Lease, and Mucahid Kutlu.

Best Paper Award at AIRS 2015

Out team got best paper award at Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference (AIRS) 2015 for the paper titled “Improving Tweet Timeline Generation by Predicting Optimal Retrieval Depth” co-authored with our PhD student Maram Hasanain and Dr. Walid Magdy (QCRI).

Ranked 3rd at TREC Microblog Track 2015

Our bigIR team (Reem Suwaileh, Maram Hasanain, and Dr. Tamer Elsayed) got ranked 3rd at TREC 2015, Microblog track, realtime filtering task, push notification scenario among 14 participating international teams.

First MSc with Distinction in QU-CENG History (Maram Hasanain, Sep 2014)

Our team member Maram Hasanain has received her MSc thesis degree *with Distinction* (with consensus of all examination committee members) in the first time in the history of College of Engineering at Qatar University. Examination committee included Prof. Ali Jaoua (QU), Dr. Abdelkarim Erradi (QU), and Prof. Franciska de Jong (University of Twente).

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