MoU between Birzeit Uni and RedCrow in computational linguistics

16/5/2015, the computer science department at Birzeit University and RedCrow company have signed an agreement to use the research and lexical resources developed by the department towards building smart security-alerting systems. The agreement was signed by Dr Abaza, the dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology, and Hussein Nasser Al Dein, CEO of RedCrow, in the presence of head of the CS Department Dr. Basem Sairafi and Dr Mustafa Jarrar from Birzeit University as well as RedCrow’s COO Laila Akel and CTO Al-Tayeb Akel.

It is worth noting that Dr. Jarrar has recently won the Google’s Faculty Research Award to support his research to integrate and publish a large number of lexicons, in addition to his pioneering research to develop an Arabic Ontology, a well-annotated corpus for Palestinian dialect, and a suit of smart NLP algorithms.

RedCrow was also awarded a scholarship by Google for Entrepreneurs to attend blackbox.vc program in Silicon Valley due to its distinctive and innovative project. The start up assists those living and working in volatile political environments in avoiding physical security threats by providing them with real time intelligence. The risk mitigation solution is based on an automated process of aggregating data, processing it and locating the threats on maps.

The agreement creates a new cooperation approach between Birzeit University and the IT industry that could be a model for future cooperation between other Palestinian companies and academia. This cooperation will ensure the exchange of scientific and technical expertise between the two parties, to create a healthy environment that encourages the culture of creativity and bridge the gap between theory and practice. The university will provide RedCrow with their research results and data, while RedCrow will share their expertise with the department and provide training opportunities for Birzeit IT students.

Dean Dr Abaza highlighted the importance of the role of the university to support the private sector with advanced technological research, and explained that this agreement proves the importance of scientific research in supporting the Palestinian societal and economical needs.

Mr. Nasser Eddin also acknowledged the importance of the research that the computer science dept is conducting, specially its pioneering achievements in the field of natural language processing. He promised to give a high priority in employing graduates of the computer science dept. Mr Nasser Eddin stated that RedCrow’s services will also be offered in other countries.