10th International Conference on Islamic Applications in Computer Science and Technologies
(IMAN 2022)
3 – 4 December 2022
Online

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.