Syntax and Semantic

TV ratings conventionally depend on focus groups and/or set top devices that keep track of the channels and shows viewed. This approach has been the main source of information for rating TV shows, sports, news, etc and it has been an integral part of the economics of the TV industry . But with the growing sources of viewing TV programmes either live (using TV sets or online streaming) or later (using video on demand either through set top devices or online portals) and with the growing number of TV viewers posting their opinions about what they are viewing, TV programmes rating is become a more challenging task that requires innovative solutions. On the other hand, recently booming terms like "Connected Viewers" and "Two Screen Viewing" describe TV viewers that use their smart phones or tablets while watching TV. These smart devices forms a rich source of information on the TV viewing habits of the device's owners. This information can help both the TV ind...

Recently, I have been working on integrating Click Modular Router to work with both WiFi cards and USRPs to facilitate the development of cognitive radio testbeds. I am using GNURadio to control N210 USRPs . I found that developing routing hops to be interesting and worth sharing as it requires the USRP to simultaneously send and receive. This requires the transmission and reception to be on separated frequencies.  For transmission, first a client socket must be created in the click configuration code. Socket(TCP, localhost, 4002, Client true) Then, I used a thread to constantly listens on that socket and transmits the data once a new packet is received. This allows for the separation of tasks and good visibility of the transmission code. I noticed that there is a trend to include the transmission code within the main function which degrades the code readability. The thread takes as a parameter the top_block describing the data path on the USRP. clas...

For the third year I was invited to give a talk at Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University 2011 and I wanted to talk about something that links what I am doing now (I am a research assistant at E-JUST) and open source so I started researching Open Source Science. Starting from the fact that I use a lot of open source modules and packages in my work developed by others and put on the internet for everyone to use. I began to understand the wider concept of open science which aims at enabling everyone who is willing to participate in any scientific endeavor to have a part in it. Facilitated by the internet, ideas, tasks, documents, code, scientific data and even videos of experiments are shared by the project's coordinator for anyone to participate in anyway and every way possible. And the results are amazing !! My main goal from the presentation and this post is to show how openness can boost research either by using the collective intellige...

Today I presented "Contributing to Open Source" as a part of Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University 2010 held at Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The audience was great and helped in making the presentation better than I anticipated. This is the presentation I hope it would be useful to those that missed the event. Contributing to Open Source View more presentations from Ahmed Saeed . It was cool to be presenting at the BA for the first time.

Lately I have been exploring the research communities and opportunities in Egypt, specially Computer Science oriented research groups. I was amazed by the number of opportunities that are available now specially for a fresh graduate like myself. I'll try to list some of the opportunities I have came across and that I consider tempting. 1. Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC) : One of the best research centers and it collaborates with a lot of the institutions that follows. There you'll get the chance to work with cutting edge technologies developing projects that will directly help the Arabic community. 2. Government Funded Research Projects: Development funds like ITIDA, NTRA and STDF are providing support for research projects and IT projects on all level. It's quite interesting to be working on an independent research project that totally matches your interests with absolutely no restrictions and get payed. 3. E-JUST &  N...

I have been working throughout the past year on my graduation project. The main target of the project was accelerating a Numerical Weather Prediction model (the Weather Research and Forecasting model) using GPUs. We implemented the latest version of one of the modules and our implementation was published as part of the latest release of a system supported by the United States Air Force and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA). After our thesis defense we decided to go on with this work and submit it as a research poster to a high ranking conference and we chose PACT. International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT) is a top tier, rank 1 conference. We submitted our work as a research poster for the ACM Student Research Competition in the Undergraduate Category ( I have already particpated at an ACM SRC at MobiCom'09 last summer ). I was informed on 22nd of July 2010 that our work "Quantifying the Impact of GPU Specific Optim...

I have been struggling with compiling complex CUDA code, with complex I mean a lot of .cu .F .cpp and .c files. I have created a makefile that can help you compile that kind of code. I'll try to give a quick view of it here explaining some parts: First you'll need to specify the CUDA path and the compilers and linkers. Here I am using gcc and g++ for .c and .cpp files and nvcc for .cu files: CUDA_INSTALL_PATH ?= /usr/local/cuda CXX := g++ CC := gcc LINK := g++ -fPIC NVCC := nvcc -ccbin /usr/bin Then you need to specify where to locate the CUDA header files : # Includes INCLUDES = -I. -I$(CUDA_INSTALL_PATH)/include # Common flags COMMONFLAGS += $(INCLUDES) NVCCFLAGS += $(COMMONFLAGS) CXXFLAGS += $(COMMONFLAGS) CFLAGS += $(COMMONFLAGS) Then you specify where to locate the CUDA binaries for linking : LIB_CUDA := -L$(CUDA_INSTALL_PATH)/lib -lcudart Then you specify the object files that the executable depends on and the name of the executable flle:...