Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speaker 1

Prof. Dr. Ahmad Khaled Yousef Shukri

 

Phenomena of recitations and their implications in the recitations of the majority ten reciters

 

This talk is a research aims to spot the phenomena of the majority of reciters after collecting and categorising them, to contemplate and study them, and to extract implications out of them.
The reason for conducting this research is to find the most prominent phenomena in the recitations of the majority ten reciters, and to find the implications of those phenomena.
This research has used the inductive, analytical, descriptive, and comparative methods.
Some of the main findings include: the majority reciters assent with the most eloquent form of the language, the presence of the ten reciters in comparable ratios in the majority reciters, and the most frequently present is the Imam Abu Amr Al-Basree.

Biography:
Prof. Dr. Ahmed Khaled Shoukri holds a Ph.D. from the Islamic University of Medina. He currently works at Qatar University in addition to his permanent work at the University of Jordan since 1991. He is specialized in interpretation, Qur’anic sciences and readings. He held a number of administrative positions at the University of Jordan, such as Head of the Fundamentals of Religion Department, Assistant Dean, Director of the Islamic Cultural Center. He has published 83 books and researches, including: Al-Mueesar in the Science of Verses, Ethics of the People of the Qur’an with the Qur’an and its People, the Numerical Miracle as a Critical Study, and the Reasons for the Existence of Abnormal Recitations.

 

Keynote Speaker 2

Prof. Dr. Salwa Elsayed Hamada

Generative artificial intelligence: applications in the Arabic language

Generative artificial intelligence is one of the most prominent branches of artificial intelligence at the present time, and is used to automatically generate new content such as texts, images, and video. Generative artificial intelligence has contributed to significant development in areas such as: machine translation and content creation. The technology of generating Arabic stories with artificial intelligence contributes to preserving and developing cultural heritage using modern technology. This technology is considered an interesting field and has a promising future in the Arab world. Artificial intelligence has developed a lot and is able to process natural language and understand it well. With some artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, we can formulate phrases and sentences that look like human writing. It is still too early for valuable books written using artificial intelligence technology to appear, but the field is developing rapidly. As technology continues to improve, it is expected that we will see many high-quality stories and books written by artificial intelligence. In order to develop this field, more research and studies must be conducted and the scope of the study must be expanded to include other languages and other stories that contain a rich cultural heritage.
This research aims to explain the concept of generative artificial intelligence and its use in generating Arabic stories, its purpose, and clarify the methods used in this field. It gives examples of how to generate the Arabic story and the linguistic models used in doing so. I presented previous research ideas, mentioned the challenges facing the obstetrics process, and pointed out the features of future work in this field.

 

Biography:
Professor Dr. Salwa Hamadeh obtained her bachelor’s degree from Ain Shams Engineering, her master’s degree in computer adaptation to serve the Arabic language, and her doctorate in an intelligent system for understanding Arabic texts and interacting with them (the first Arabic chatbot) from Ain Shams Engineering. She worked as an assistant professor in computers at Taibah University in Medina, and as an associate professor in girls’ colleges in Mecca. She supervised a number of doctoral and master’s research in the field of artificial intelligence and language computing. She works at the Nozha Electronics Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt. She also works as a consultant for Reed Firth to teach the Holy Quran in America. She won several titles and awards, such as the title of Ambassador of Arab Culture, the award for the best Arab information researcher in the field of “computing the Arabic language and the text of the Holy Qur’an,” the title of Mother of Arabic Computational Linguistics, the Award and Shield of Distinction from the Language Engineering Society, and some other shields and awards. She was chosen from among one hundred individuals who served the Arabic language by the International Center for Teaching Arabic to Speakers of Other Languages eTurn. She has presented research papers in several journals and conferences in the field. The professor has various newspaper articles and has published more than 80 scientific research and articles. She is the author of a series of books in the field of automated language processing, in addition to reference books for universities in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria for the postgraduate level.

 

Keynote Speaker 3

Prof. Dr. Ahmed Sharaf Eldin Ahmed

Pitfalls in the computerization projects of the Holy Qur’an

 

With the tremendous growth of computers’ capabilities, many system developers have turned to making applications in forensic sciences, especially the Holy Qur’an. Since many of these people focus on presenting the developed application in a good and acceptable way to the end user, they may miss some other important issues that an ordinary user does not pay attention to.
This research discusses some fundamental issues that should be considered when developing these systems.
The researcher divides these caveats into two main parts: the religious part and the technical part
The research paper simplifies the most important caveats in this regard, providing some examples and proposing some appropriate solutions.

 

Biography:
Prof. Dr. Ahmed Sharaf Eldin Ahmed graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, at Cairo University in 1966. He began studying computers in 1968, which led to him obtaining a doctorate in computer science from Loughborough University in England. His graduate study path included a variety of fields at the diploma and master’s levels in addition to computers. These fields are Islamic studies, engineering, statistics, operations research, management, and Islamic archeology. Dr. Ahmed is considered as one of the first generation of computing professionals in Egypt.
He currently holds the position of Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology and Computer Science at Sinai University in Egypt, seconded from Helwan University. Before that, he was at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where he contributed to establishing the first specialized college in the Arab world in the field of computers in the eighties of the last century.
He has many publications in the field of computers, including books, scientific papers, and supervision of master’s and doctoral dissertations, some of which are related to the computerizing of Islamic sciences. He is also a member of the Supreme Council of Al-Ashraf’s Syndicate in Egypt, the Egyptian Society of Engineers, as well as the IEEE Society, the ACM Society, the AIS Society, and others.
He obtained the Holy Qur’an recitation certificate for his ten readings a long time ago. He recited and taught Quran recitation a long time ago and has students in several countries in addition to Egypt. He is also currently the Sheikh of one of the recitation rounds in Egypt.

 

 

Keynote Speaker 4

Prof. Dr. Othman Omran Khalifa

Promises and Implications of AI in Teaching and Learning

 

A revolutionary era in education has begun with the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into teaching and learning. This integration offers a multitude of advantages and distinct challenges for educators, students, and educational institutions. AI technologies provide tailored educational experiences that adjust to the unique requirements and learning preferences of each student. In a way that traditional teaching approaches frequently find difficult to accomplish, this customization of information and pace has the potential to improve comprehension and retention.
Additionally, AI in education makes it easier to automate administrative duties, freeing up teachers to concentrate more on the engaging and interactive parts of teaching. Teachers may then take on the role of facilitators, helping students with collaborative projects, critical thinking, and problem-solving instead of just information delivery. Automating repetitive operations can increase productivity and expedite educational processes, which can lessen the administrative load on educational institutions.
However, the widespread implementation of AI in education is not without its challenges and implications. Concerns related to data privacy, algorithmic biases, and the ethical use of AI in decision-making processes must be carefully addressed to ensure a fair and inclusive learning environment. Additionally, there is a need for adequate training and professional development for educators to harness the full potential of AI tools effectively. The integration of AI in education also raises questions about the future employability of teachers in a landscape where technology assumes a more prominent role in the learning process.

 

Biography:
Prof. Dr. Othman Omran Khalifa received his bachelor’s degree in electrical and Electronic Engineering from Garyounis University, Libya in 1986. He obtained his Master’s degree and PhD from Newcastle University, UK in 1996 and 2000 respectively. He worked in industries for eight years and he is currently a professor at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, International Islamic University Malaysia. Prof. Khalifa served as the head of department of Electrical and computer Engineering, IIUM from July 2005 until December 2014. He is a Charter Engineer (CEng) UK, a Senior member of IEEE USA, and a member IET UK. Prof. Khalifa was the chairman of the International Conference on Computer and Communication Engineering (ICCCE), 2006, 2010, 2012, 2014. Prof. Khalifa supervised more than 60 Masters and PhD students. He has extensively contributed through his writings in international journals, conferences and books. He published more than 500 publications including 12 books. In 2013, he received the highest citation in Citation Indexed Journal Award, in 2019 he got the TOKOH academic “Best Academician” award and last year in 2020, he Won the Murabbi “Best Teacher” award. In 2021, he got the publication (book publication) award. In 2022 won the National Best Book in Science and technology 2022.

 

Keynote Speaker 5

Dr. Waleed Kadous

Ansari: Experience with a real Islamic LLM

 

Ansari (ansari.chat) is an Islamic chatbot that uses carefully constructed system prompts plus retrieval augmented generation (e.g. Qur'an) to provide answers that people have. It has handled more than 5,000 queries from users, and gets upwards of 80 questions from users a day. It builds on GPT-4. We've found it to produce high quality answers. We walk through some of the capabilities of Ansari, show how they are built and raise some religious and worldly questions about how Ansari can and should be used.

 

Biography:
Dr. Waleed Kadous is Chief Scientist at Anyscale, the company behind the popular open source distributed computing platform Ray. He leads the company’s LLM efforts. Prior to Anyscale, Waleed worked at Uber, where he led overall system architecture, evangelized machine learning, and led the Location and Maps teams. He previously worked at Google, where he founded the Android Location and Sensing team, responsible for the “blue dot” as well as ML algorithms underlying products like Google Fit. He also holds more than 40 patents.

 

Keynote Speaker 6

Prof. Dr. Eric Atwell

Biography:
Prof. Eric Atwell is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence for Language at the School of Computing, University of Leeds. He has a long track record of natural language processing research going back more than 40 years. His areas of expertise include AI, Language Computing, Linguistics, Machine Learning, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing, Text Analytics, and more.
He also works part-time at LITE Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence as a LITE Fellow, where he conducts research in AI for Decolonizing Reading Lists. In addition, he is a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and a member of LIDA Leeds Institute for Data Analytics and LATL (Language At Leeds).
Professor Atwell leads the AI4L Artificial Intelligence for Language research group at the University of Leeds. He teaches Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining and Text Analytics to students in several degree programs.