Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : academic

UAE University and Jebel Hafeet

pooyad — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:10:00 GMT

What an interesting day. Spent the day at UAE University, one of the largest and most prestigious universities in the UAE meeting some of the professors and getting a tour of the labs there. Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis (who runs the lab) showed me around the Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory (IRML) where I saw some of their research projects including Ibn Sina (the world's first Arabic-speaking Humanoid Robot) and a Microsoft funded project called FaceBots (Facebook + Robots), which is just fun and could be expanded so much more (think twitter). I also met Dr. Hesham El Sayed, who I need to thank for giving me an orientation on education in the UAE and also for introducing me to the Entrepreneurship center at the university. Finally I met Dr. Leila Ismail who runs the High Performance Grid Computing Lab at the university and has been an Imagine Cup mentor for some successful teams from UAEU.

Some of the highlights were seeing Dr. Nikolaos’ monitor which is an idea I hope to copy soon,

seeing a camel in the back of a pick-up truck

and then getting to finally go to Jebel Hafeet.

I’ve been living in Dubai for 3 years and have visited Al Ain several times (the Zoo is a must), but had never gone up Jebel Hafeet. Well, today was the day, what a great drive up,

seeing the sunset from the top and enjoying Iftar at the summit was fantastic.

Students and Startups

pooyad — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:40:00 GMT

My 1st blog post in a while and a good time to discuss some of the changes you’ll notice around here. This year I’m going to be focusing a lot more on Academia and what we refer to as the Local Software Economy. Basically this means I’ll spend a lot more time with students and professors and also on promoting entrepreneurship (I’m going to misspell this at least 100 times this year) in the Gulf. So there’ll be a little less architecture and a little more research focused, student focused and a lot more on jobs and start-ups. Working with universities this past month has made me realize how much I miss school and learning in general and working with start-ups is going to be great, takes me back to my roots, maybe I can live vicariously through them :) If you’re a start-up in the Gulf, drop me a line and let’s talk, there’s a huge amount of help Microsoft can provide, I’ll be posting about some of these here on the blog in the near future.

Judging student software competitions

pooyad — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:48:00 GMT

I had the honor of being a judge at the Software Development Trade Show hosted at University of Wollongong in Dubai
It was a great event and good to see the level of projects that undergraduate students are doing here locally. Every team did a great job and the winners had some really impressive projects. The first prize winners had a robot simulation which they've entered into RoboCup, the only entrant from the arab region.

Last week Microsoft hosted the Imagine Cup finals and the winners there from UAE University also had a great project for using their commute time to help them learn more by having quizzes available on their mobile phones.

From both of these competitions it seems as if the student generation is really looking at how new technologies can improve their lives and the community around them. I have 2 comments and advice for anyone in these types of competitions:

1. Keep in mind that the judges have a very short amount of time to learn about your project. You've probably spend months if not a year on it so you know everything about your project, but we (the judges) know very little or nothing. Before getting into the details of how you did the project, tell us what the project is and make sure people understand the goal. At yesterday's event, we judged 21 teams and got to spend 5 minutes with each, so knowing the goal was the key to understand why they approached it in certain ways.

This is not just for competitions but in any presentation, make sure people get the bigger picture because otherwise the details are just details with no context. As they say in any presentation:

First, Tell them what you're going to show them; Then Show them; Finally Sum up and tell them again what you showed them :)

2. If the judges are from "Industry" as I was one of 2 industry representatives yesterday, they will tend to be tougher on certain aspects than academic judges. When you're starting a new project, research what's out there already. It may not seem as important in academia but within industry we're always looking at competition and new ideas and innovation. One of the first questions you'll get asked by a VC or in this case a judge is "How is your solution better than XYZ (something on the market)?" What's your competitive advantage? Think about that before starting the project and keep it in mind as a question you'll always get, at least from me :)