Education

Entrepreneurship Education

Promoting education on the culture of entrepreneurship and innovation is essential to building a strong foundation for growth in the MENA region. MENA cultural perspectives often discourage risky attempts at entrepreneurship, while the lack of training, support, and basic resources make the road more difficult for those who try. TechWadi works with the Silicon Valley community and key partners in the MENA region to encourage the development of courses, workshops, and webinars targeted at MENA students and entrepreneurs. This initiative is led by both academia and industry, including professors from Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley, and professionals from Google, Cisco, and many others.
 

The TechWadi Remote Collaboration Initiative

The remote collaboration initiative aims to facilitate knowledge transfer between scholars in the Arab world and professionals residing abroad. Working along four distinct tracks, we aim to increase engagement between top students, universities, and other educational centers in the Middle East and top professionals and educators in the expatriate community. The goal of this program is to work with all existing players in the ecosystem and build a platform that simplifies the process for Arab scholars and professionals to transfer their specialized knowledge to students across the Middle East.

The program is led by a team of active volunteers, educators and industry professionals. We are looking for like-minded individuals and groups who believe in our vision to join and drive this project to success.

Dr. Mohamed Aly

Dr. Mohamed Aly is a senior research engineer at Yahoo! Research. Dr. Aly is a member of the Computational Advertising group and he focuses on developing techniques for modeling the user interests through the large-scale analysis of the user online activities to improve behavioral targeting. His research interests include large-scale statistical data mining, information retrieval, and web mining. Dr. Aly graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and Automatic Control from Alexandria Faculty of Engineering, Egypt on 2002 and he received both his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007 and 2009, respectively. His Ph.D. research focused on developing large-scale distributed indexing schemes for improving information retrieval in ad-hoc sensor networks. Dr. Aly has a decent industrial R&D experience in the field of statistical user modeling. Prior to joining Yahoo! in 2008, he had a long 6-months internship at Google Research, where he focused on developing novel techniques for improving behavioral targeting on the Myspace social network as well as improving video recommendations on Youtube. At Yahoo! Research, Dr. Aly is currently focusing on developing Yahoo!’s next-generation user modeling platform for behavioral targeting.

 

Dr. Ahmad Rushdi

Ahmad Rushdi received the B.Sc.and M.Sc.degrees in Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, in 2002 and 2004 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Califiornia, Davis in 2008. Since September 2008, he has been with Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose CA. His current work with the Unified Access Business Unit (UABU) involves signal and power integrity for system and chip design. Dr. Rushdi is the recipient of several teaching awards from Cairo University, the American University in Cairo (AUC), and the University of California, Davis. He is also an active member within the engineering and scientific research communities and a certified IEEE Wireless Communications Professional (WCP). His research interests include statistical and multirate signal processing with applications in system design, wireless communications, and bioinformatics.