Professor Mustafa Jarrar wins Shoman Arab Researchers Award in Technology

Mustafa Jarrar, a professor of computer science at Birzeit University, has recently won the 2019 Abdul Hameed Shoman Arab Researchers Award in Technology for his distinguished research on Arabic computational linguistics. 

Jarrar’s recent research achievements include besides the Lexicographic Search Engine ⎯ a tool he and his team designed to trawl through the Arabic-multilingual lexicographic database that they have developed over the past nine years ⎯ the Arabic Ontology, a classification of the concepts/meanings of Arabic terms that facilitates computer parsing of Arabic semantics, and the Palestinian Dialect Corpus that allows applications to parse and understand Arabic dialects, especially in social media and dialogue systems.

Jarrar and his team have won the Mohammed Bin Rashid Award for Arabic Language, the Google Faculty Research Award, the Fulbright Fellowship, the Marie Curie Fellowship, and many other international awards and grants. 

Jarrar joined Birzeit university in 2009, was a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a Marie Curie fellow at the university of Cyprus for two years, and spent nine years at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, where he obtained his Ph.D. 

The 2019 Abdul Hameed Shoman Arab Researchers Award saw 382 applicants from every part of the Arab world vie for a chance to win one of 15 awards divided across six categories: medical and health sciences; engineering sciences; basic sciences; literature and humanitarian, social, and educational sciences; economics and administrative sciences; and agriculture and technology. Two topics under each field are selected as award themes each year. 

Launched in 1982, the Abdul Hameed Shoman Arab Researchers Award is the first of its kind to be dedicated for researchers in the Arab world. It supports and highlights scientific research and recognizes distinguished research outcomes with scientific and social value.