Keynote Speakers

 

Keynote Speaker 1

Prof. Dr. Mohamed Ridza Bin Wahiddin

The Importance of Digital Transformation for the Ummah and Humanity

 

The Twelfth Malaysia Plan is primarily to re-set the national economy. It has to address the long-standing low income, low productivity and low innovation issues. The way forward is to adopt the quintuple helix approach to enhance the performance and contributions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This entails the digital transformation of SMEs. There are several critical success factors in order to realise this. These include a common language that transcends technology to communicate across functions within an organisation, nurturing technology translators, creating awareness as well as educating stakeholders about emergence of new professions and most importantly, a good command of mathematical sciences: especially modelling, simulation and optimisation methods (MSO). Digital twins are making an impact in the digital era. A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical object, process or service. Creating one can allow the enhancement of strategic technology trends, prevent costly failures in physical objects and also, by using advanced analytical, monitoring and predictive capabilities, test processes and services. There are two main approaches of applied mathematics to digitalization in this context: Physics-Based and Data-Driven. Although the above is about Malaysia the approach may be adopted and adapted by other countries. It is imperative to start early, programs which aim to instil the awareness and spark the interest in the community particularly students in secondary and tertiary education, teachers and parents, about the existence of new professions (future ready workforce) through the advocacy of opportunities and challenges. Apart from skill sets, talent management is very much dependent on enduring capabilities. The latter are imbued with values. It is the author’s conviction that these values are found in Insan Rabbani (noble God-fearing person) capable of developing his/her personal life, family, community and country, towards a prosperous and compassionate civilisation for gaining the pleasure of Allah the Al-Mighty. That is, the well-being of the future world depends on the digital transformation driven by these Insan Rabbani individuals.

Biography:
Prof. Dr. Mohamed Ridza was the fifth Vice-Chancellor of Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM), Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. He received his PhD (Theoretical Physics) and DSc (Higher Doctoral Degree) from UMIST, Manchester, U.K. He also has a Diploma in Islamic Studies from International Islamic University Malaysia. Prof. Dr. Mohamed Ridza had many academic and adminstrative positions in several malaysian universities. He published many research papers in local and international conferences and journals. His research interests include Quantum Optics, Quantum Information, Information Security, Mathematical Modeling, and Human Computer Interfacing.

 

Keynote Speaker 2

Prof. Dr. Sane Yagi

Towards an Automated Arabic Punctuation System

What complicates Arabic computational processing is partly the linguistic nature of this language, the customary omission of diacritics in its orthography, and the inconsistent punctuation practice. We will address here the third source of trouble by (1) describing a syntactically-punctuated, manually verified dataset that may be used as a gold standard for training machine learning systems, for developing Arabic NLP tools, and for conducting linguistic research; and by (2) outlining and demonstrating an automatic punctuation system.
The dataset consists of three types of data for three varieties of Arabic. To represent the language of the scholarship from pre-Islamic times until the end of the 18th century that is often referred to as Classical Arabic, the dataset includes grammar-based punctuated versions of the Holy Qur’an, Al-Arba3een Al-Nawawiya, and two chapters of Jahiz’s Al-Bayan wa Attabyeen. To represent the language of scholarship from the renaissance until now, usually labeled as Modern Standard Arabic, the dataset consists of the second chapter of 30 books in 30 disciplines. Some of the literary books of concern here were written by such authors as Abbas Mahmoud Al-3aqqad, Mohammed Amin, Al-Manfalouti, Taha Hussain, and Najib Mahfoudh. Non-fiction books came from such areas of scholarship as psychology, sociology, business, health, science, etc. To represent the modern written-spoken hybrid language that we refer to as Contemporary Arabic, there are samples of newspaper articles from 20 Arab countries that have been grammar-based punctuated. All the data was punctuated in accordance with the rules of Arabic grammar, with the completion of the musnad-musnad ilayh (theme-rheme) being the defining principle of a sentence. Of special concern to us is sentence terminal marks because of two reasons: (1) Sentence terminals can be conclusively decided if grammatical criteria are applied; (2) Most computational processing requires the demarcation of sentences, be it machine translation, question-answering, signal processing, text parsing, lexicography, information retrieval, text classification, or corpus tagging, etc.
The automatic punctuation system is machine learning based. It trains on our manually punctuated dataset to learn punctuation rules, thereby avoiding the laborious process of human rule formulation. Without any need for the linguistic expertise that feature engineering requires, we use a deep learning algorithm that can learn features automatically. BERT is used as our context. Its embedding layer takes input tokens and returns a vector for each. The transformer encoder layer enhances each input token vector by encoding global contextual information applying the self-attention layers iteratively. BERT will be fine-tuned on the dataset for the punctuation of new texts

Biography:
His B.A. is from the University of Jordan, M.A. from the University of Kansas, and Ph.D. from Auckland University. He is currently a professor at the University of Sharjah and the University of Jordan. He taught at universities in the U.S.A., New Zealand, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. He held several administrative positions: chairman of the departments of English, Linguistics, Asian languages, and foreign languages; as well as dean of the college of foreign languages. His research interests are in the fields of computational semantics and lexicology; language corpora; machine learning, and language education. He has books, research articles, and software titles in all of these fields.

 

 

Keynote Speaker 3

Prof. Dr. Saud Abdulaziz Alaqeel

Al-Aqil Software: A brief definition

 

Al-Aqil Software started more than thirty years ago with a few programs with a size of (1400) kilobytes, and now it contains more than 400 programs with a size of approximately 3 gigabytes. It contains a number of encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia of Hadith, Encyclopedia of Narrators, Encyclopedia of Translation ... etc. The main objective of it is to serve scientific research, especially Islamic studies research and the Arabic language, in short, time, effort and money in completing these research in the best way, and it is 100% free.

 

Biography:
Prof. Dr. Saud Al-Aqeel is the former Dean of the College of Sharia and Islamic Studies in Al-Ahsa and the owner of Al-Aqil Software. He holds a PhD in theology and contemporary doctrines from Al-Imam University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He worked on a set of software that serves researchers in Islamic and Arabic studies in their messages and research. More than 330 software in the Qur’an, Hadith, poems, footnotes, indexing ... etc. Participated in many local and international conferences, workshops and forums. He gave a lot of training courses.

 

 

Keynote Speaker 4

Prof. Dr. Omar Mehdioui

Computational Linguistics in the Service of the holy Qur’an

 

This scientific paper aims to give a very brief view of what computational linguistics is and its relationship to the Arabic language in general and to the Holy Qur’an in particular, and then to clarify the most important historical paths that natural language processing and its practical applications to human tongues and their natural texts have gone through.
The study will conclude by showing the main areas in the Holy Qur’an that can benefit from computing, which will enable the completion of Quranic computer applications that will benefit the Muslim person now and in the future, and then this will be reflected on the Arab Islamic society in all aspects and fields. There is no Islamic development without the development of the language of the Noble Qur’an, because the Arabic language is the magic key to every economic, social, cultural and scientific progress. Today’s global experiences have shown that natural language is the tool and means for building a contemporary society based on knowledge and the digital economy, and facing the upcoming challenges requires a strong and sober Islamic knowledge economy capable of keeping pace with the pace of modern information technology, which is moving at a rapid pace.

 

Biography:
Dr.Mehdioui is  an Associate Professor of Languages and Lexicography at Moulay Ismail University, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Meknes, Kingdom of Morocco. He  is an expert in lexical and linguistic applications on the computer, and  an international Lecturer in Language Engineering. He is also  an educational researcher in preparing and evaluating educational programs, and an Arbitrator and reviewer for Arabic language computing programs. He was participated as a keynote speaker in many international conferences and symposia, and a research associate in several Arab and international scientific projects. In addition to that, he is a Vice President of the Moroccan Association for Lexical Studies

 

Keynote Speaker 5

Dr. Aznan Zuhid bin Saidin

The relationship between humans and technology: an Islamic perspective

 

There is a connection between humans and technology, hence the use of the word ‘relationship’. This is because technology has become inseparable from the daily life of humans. Humans has created technology as means to make their life better, however it seems that is not always the case. Technology has come back in many ways to make the life of humans worse than before. What is meant by ‘better’ itself has become a matter of huge debate, because what is perceived as ‘better’ or ‘worse’ by some may not always be acceptable by others. Therefore, a more stable explanation is needed in describing this relationship between humans and technology. An Islamic perspective is put forward to provide that explanation. This is based on the premise that humans are created by God to live responsibly in this world as they will be accountable for their actions in the afterlife, which includes their actions of developing and using technology. In certain aspects, the relation between humans and technology has become problematic because humans have placed technology at a dignified position, a position normally reserved for the Almighty. The Islamic perspective presented here tends to correct this and provide an explanation on how should the relationship between humans and technology be in a way that places man in the proper position in that relationship.

 

Biography:
Dr. Aznan is an Assistant Professor at Kulliyyah of Information and Communication Technology, International Islamic University Malaysia. He completed his PhD at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Malaya. He received his Bachelor in Islamic Revealed Knowledge & Heritage from IIUM and M.Sc. in Information Management from Universiti Teknologi Mara. He was the Deputy Dean (Student Affairs) for several terms and now as the Coordinator for Islamisation in the Kulliyyah of Information and Communication Technology, International Islamic University Malaysia. His research interests are on the Islamic perspective on ICT issues, technology studies and philosophy of technology. He has written and presented on these topics in local and international publications and conferences, as well as and been invited as a speaker by various organisations.