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Huawei has announced the 57 winners of the XMAGE Awards 2023. The competition, which spotlights photos taken with Huawei devices, named three grand prize winners, 17 best-in-category winners, 34 runner-up winners, and three honorable mentions.
This year’s winners were selected from more than 600,000 entries received between April 7 and Aug. 15 from participants from nearly 100 countries. After China, the five countries with the highest number of entries were Malaysia, Türkiye, Poland, the Philippines, and the UAE. The most popular phone models used were the P60 Pro, P40 Pro, and Mate 40 Pro.
Out of the 17 best-in-category winners, one hails from Egypt. Sadek Khafagy won the award in the outdoor category for his work titled “Reflection.” His image captures the striking beauty of the unique rock formations of The Wave in Arizona. After a rainy day, water pools in this area reflect the oranges and yellows of the layered rock walls and bright blue sky. Khafagy’s photograph masterfully depicts this vista in perfect symmetry.
Regional talents honored
A number of photographers from the Middle East and Africa region have won special awards from the Huawei community. The UAE, being one of the countries with the most submissions, bagged 10 out of the 15 MEA XMAGE Awards dolled out in 2023. Their images told rich visual stories from breathtaking landscapes, glistening architecture, and the diverse culture of the UAE. Talented photographers from Saudi Arabia and South Africa also earned special awards. The special awards had gold, silver and bronze winners in several categories ranging from portraits and art and fashion to “Hello Life” and outdoor.
Gold winners: In the art and fashion category, the image “Art-Chitecture” captures a unique architectural design with excellent composition that almost makes it look like a flower. The portrait “Drying Up” is a monochrome shot of a man drying hotel towels, full of a sense of story. And “Water Drop” in the Hello Life category was a creatively inverted macro shot of a water droplet against a surreally colorful background.
Silver winners: In Hello Life, “Golden Summertime” encapsulated the radiance of summer in a vivid splash of golden sunset colors. The portrait “Behind the Mask” shows an Emirati girl with her eyes conveying deep emotion behind her traditional face mask, a poetic image that celebrates cultural heritage. The joyful “Best Buddies” image depicts the silhouette of children at the beach against the colorful hues of the evening sky, representing the innocence and sincerity of childhood friendship. The expressive portrait “Innocent Beauty” masterfully uses chiaroscuro lighting to accentuate the doe-eyed gaze of a young girl. In the outdoor category, “Skyscrapers” features tiny window cleaners rappelling down the gleaming facade of a soaring skyscraper. This photo contrasts immense architecture with small human figures.
Bronze winners: The serene “The Kite Runner” captures a solitary young boy silhouetted against a misty dawn sky as he tries to fly his kite. The cinematic “Life Sun” depicts the blazing sun casting dramatic rays through the immense desert landscape of AlUla. Another spectacular shot titled “Kyrgyzstan Postcard View” documents the culmination of a rewarding nine-hour mountain trek, showcasing the cascading valleys and jagged peaks revealing themselves in a breathtaking panorama.
“The Last Light” is an atmospheric landscape taken at dusk, the fading sun casting the mountainous terrain in an ethereal glow. The “Night Under the Galaxy’s Lights” places an SUV in the middle, framed by the dazzling sweep of the Milky Way and some light-painting trickery. The image titled “There is No Love Like Snail Love” playfully highlights nature’s wonder through two spiraled gastropods tenderly exploring each other’s shells. And the portrait of a farmer carrying a woven basket on his head demonstrates excellent cultural storytelling.
Through unique perspectives, artistry, and storytelling, these 15 photographers from the Middle East and Africa have proven themselves at the forefront of their field.
The three grand prize-winning photographs that captured the judges’ hearts include: “Dragon Clouds” by Domcar Calinawan Lagto from the Philippines, “Airshow” by Piotr Cebula from Poland, and “Fearless Eagle” by Dou Chuanli from China. Each grand prize winner will receive $10,000 from the XMAGE creation fund, to support their photography and to encourage them to continue using Huawei devices in the future.
The 17 best-in-category winners and the 34 runner-up winners will each receive $1,500 and $1000, respectively.
source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)
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Sadek Khafagy from Egypt won the award in the outdoor category for his work titled ‘Reflection.’ His image captures the beauty of the rock formations of The Wave in Arizona.
After years lost in an educational wilderness, the Egyptian-British designer found his niche as a world authority on Islamic art and architecture with noble patrons such as King Charles III.
The Chelsea Flower Show was just some annual event that happened in London as far as Khaled Azzam was concerned, until the day he answered a call from the heir to the throne.
Prince Charles , inspired by two antique Turkish rugs at his residence in Gloucestershire, was on the phone with an unusual brief: “I want you to work with me to design a garden.”
“I thought it was fabulous,” Azzam tells The National. “I’d never designed a garden before in my life so I went to see him at Highgrove House. He’s long been fascinated with Islamic art and architecture, and, because that’s what I practise, we always spoke about such things.
“He said, ‘All these carpets that I live with and love are interpretations of gardens, but I would like to design and build a garden that is an interpretation of carpets. I want to flip it around’.”
So it was that in 2001, among the usual avant-garde displays and emerging trends at the horticultural showcase, the first entry ever submitted by a member of the British royal family instead dug deep into the past.
The classic Islamic charbagh representing the four gardens of Paradise in the Quran was a crowd-drawing triumph yet, when it won a coveted silver-gilt medal, Azzam remembers thinking: “Whoa, that’s crazy.”
In situ ever since at the Highgrove estate, The Carpet Garden is the living incarnation of the two men’s long combined efforts to bring forth new shoots from ancient artistic roots.
Now, more than 20 years on, Azzam presides as director of the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts that is regarded as a centre for excellence in teaching the geometries held to be the common thread between age-old skills all but abandoned in much of the modern world.
The aim is to nurture patterning techniques such as the kind of inlaid stone workmanship used to create the Cosmati Pavement, the 13th-century mosaic floor on which, fittingly, the throne will be placed during the coronation ceremony for King Charles III inside Westminster Abbey on Saturday.
An extensive network of PSTA outreach programmes has spread across the globe from the core educational base in London to regenerate the cultural heritage of different regions and communities, from Jamaica to the UAE to China.
But, from the outset, the school’s ethos often evoked incomprehension, ridicule and, at times, undisguised animosity from some within the art establishment.
“There were moments that I was very, very worried, saying, ‘if this dies, it dies with us’,” Azzam recalls. “What His Majesty was saying that architecture, cities and education should be about, and how we should deal with the environment, was not commonplace. All those things were seen to be interesting and quaint. We never saw ourselves as being alternative. We were part of what we used to call ‘essential thinking’.
“Very early on, we had this strong bond; we understood exactly what we had to do. Then, I had to understand something. He was a prince, now he’s a king. We’ve had visionaries, we’ve had patrons all throughout history, that is the role of a prince. But my role is to make it happen.”
If the mission was to accumulate centuries of precious creative knowledge for alumni to reinvigorate and, in turn, hand to the next generation then there was one significant impediment.
“There weren’t any masters to teach us,” Azzam says.
The disconcerting discovery came when he went to set up a regional centre in his birthplace in 2005 with the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, Art Jameel and local artisans from whom he had hoped to gain a deeper understanding of tradition.
Instead, Azzam had a moment of transformational thinking that “not everything old is beautiful” — the craftsmen and women, in spite of their evident skills, had for generations been learning by rote.
“I really respect them and their role in the community but some of it was quite shoddy workmanship. They would start telling me, ‘Ah, but you don’t know, I am an eighth-generation carpenter and I learnt this from my grandfather’.
“But, because we came from an academic background and could analyse this stuff, I said, ‘your grandfather made a mistake three generations ago and you’re just repeating that mistake’.”
Most saddening for Azzam, however, was that the artists were stuck perpetually reproducing the same designs over and over again. Without much grasp of the underlying mathematical principles, they were incapable of extending the lineage of their traditional arts and crafts by creating anything new.
“It opened my eyes to the limitations of simply teaching young people through copying the forms of the past. We had to go back to the origin, to deconstruct buildings and understand how they were built. We had to look at certain principles to see what they were about. In a way, it was a voyage backwards.
“Then there was a moment where we started turning around, and now we feel that there is enough of a contemporary heritage to call it a living tradition and move into the future.
“If we’ve been successful in one thing, it’s in really delivering the philosophy into practice. It’s not just talk, it’s about making things, creating this process from the origin to the manifestation.”
That their son would end up running any school, let alone a prestigious art institution for the Prince’s Foundation, would once have been inconceivable for Azzam’s parents, Laila and Omar, who long kept quiet their fears over his prospects.
Young Khaled, despite being widely read and full of curiosity about what was happening in the world, was nonetheless lost within the four walls of a classroom.
“I was always last in the class because I just didn’t understand what was going on at all.
“Although my parents never let on, they admitted it much later, saying, ‘You know, we didn’t think you’d even make it into university’.
“And the fact that I not just got into university but then got a PhD and became involved in education … my brother says it’s a sign of the end of the world,” he says, smiling affectionately at the long-running joke.
It pops up again when we’re discussing Azzam’s receipt of the Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order, a knighthood granted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2009, and his speech before Pope Benedict XVI as representative of Muslims at an interfaith forum the following year.
“I don’t know why until this day that I was chosen,” he says. “It’s another sign of the end of the world, according to my brother.”
Azzam puts being such “a terrible student” down to a childhood disrupted by frequent geographical moves but doesn’t rule out an undiagnosed learning difficulty. “In our day, you were just stupid if you didn’t get it,” he says.
Education eventually took its place as the most important part of his working life once he began to understand that the Latin root, educere, means “to draw out of” not “to put into”.
As a consequence of his own difficulties, he feels an enormous responsibility towards those unable to cope with school systems intent on treating students like empty vessels that need filling with facts and figures.
“I became very, very interested in the journey you take a student through to bring what’s in them out to the surface,” he says.
Though born in Egypt, where his mother “always returned to have her babies”, the family lived abroad because of his father’s job as a senior urban planner for the UN.
After a stint in Saudi Arabia, there was a relatively settled period of 10 years in Lebanon until civil war broke out. They struggled on for almost a year until Omar, working in Paris at the time, suggested that the rest of the family join him temporarily: “Just come over for Christmas,” was the gist, “things will die down.”
“We managed to get on a flight one day very, very quickly — just packed a hand bag each and ran off to the airport. We left everything behind, all our books, our toys, our belongings, our clothes and just never went back because the war never ended. We had to rebuild our life. Then England became my home and I’m very grateful.”
This is not quite how his younger self felt when first pitching up late one Autumn afternoon in what was then the “very, very small town” of Cambridge.
“There was nothing to do. In those days, everything shut at five o’clock. It was foggy, cold and damp, and I’d just spent two years in the South of France. I was trying to figure out what I had done wrong.”
The posse of four siblings received a hospitable welcome from the locals and quickly grew to love their adopted home and the architecture lining the cobbled streets.
There was a particularly memorable encounter, surrounded by fluted limestone columns, medieval stained-glass windows and Tudor symbols in King’s College Chapel that would later inform much of Azzam’s work.
Beneath the celebrated fan-vaulted ceiling of the 500-year-old Gothic landmark built by a succession of English monarchs, the teenager made an unexpected discovery: he found himself.
“Physically, I had nothing to do with that place. Culturally, I was an Egyptian who came to England. I wasn’t even an architect yet. I was doing my O-Levels and A-Levels.
“But there was something in me that completely understood that building; the message, the beauty of it.
“I felt I belonged there, that it was part of me. It was a very profound experience that changed my life somehow.”
Arriving at what he says all the great civilisations of the world had known, however, came only with time and experience.
It has been a constant journey of learning with two particular guiding lights along the way. The first was Abdel Wahed El Wakil, the foremost authority in Islamic architecture with whom Azzam subjected himself completely for eight intense years at a “hothouse” of an office in London.
“We had a difficult relationship because he was very demanding but he was my master who taught me everything I know about architecture,” he says. “I just totally understood that this idea of apprenticeship is to give yourself to somebody, and if you find that person, you’re very, very lucky.”
Through El Wakil, he met Keith Critchlow, the renowned geometer and founder of the Visual and Traditional Arts Department at the Prince’s Institute of Architecture, and developed a deep fascination with the properties underpinning the order of nature.
He talks of the intricate chambers of the nautilus shell and the honeycomb built in hives by bees or the movement of planets over time across the night sky, but perhaps his favourite example is the delicate, six-fold symmetry of a single ice crystal.
“All snowflakes are hexagonal because the molecular structure of water is hexagonal yet — and this blows my mind every time I say it — no two snowflakes that fall on the ground are the same.
“There is a principle of unity manifesting variety. All snowflakes start from the same origin but their final form is the record of their journey down to Earth. In a way, that’s us as human beings as well.
“If you look at a DNA structure, the very basic thing that binds us all together, it’s a beautiful spiral that has a certain proportional system and yet we’re all different.”
The firm belief that we all have the same origin is fundamental not only to his work at the school but also as principal of Khaled Azzam Associates, the “little practice” he started in 1991.
It is hard, he agrees, not to lose count of the many architectural projects he has been involved in over the years: mosques like that commissioned by King Abdallah II to commemorate his father, the late King Hussein, in Amman; royal residences, commercial buildings, offices and schools across the Middle East; and, most recently, the master plan launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to sustainably develop the historic Al Ula site in Saudi Arabia where he is headed a few days after our interview.
“I’ve been running two careers, that’s why the number of projects looks bigger than it is,” Azzam, now 62, says modestly.
When it’s pointed out that there doesn’t seem to be much spare time weighing on his hands, Azzam concedes that he wouldn’t know what to do with it if he had any. He works all day, never tiring because, well, he doesn’t see it as work.
“I am blessed in my life because I do things I love. I think very, very early on in my career, I just said: I want work to be part of my identity, part of my character — it all has to be one.
“The school has always been somewhere that I found a great sense of nourishment and fulfilment. And it’s very much part of my life. My wife, Mona, complains that they’re my family more than my family at home.”
Home proper is Clapham in south London, where Mona has laid the unshakeable foundation that has made “all this possible”, Azzam acknowledges. Everything is taken care of so that he never has to worry: the house, the well-being of their children, Issam, 24, and Nadia, 19, and the bills “that she knows I won’t pay”.
A few hours before the rest of the family wakes each day, he is already at his desk with a cup of coffee, drawing while looking out across one of London’s largest parks.
“It’s very quiet,” he says. “There’s nobody there, and then you see one person, then two people, and then you see life coming through, and you start having a funny relationship with it. It’s beautiful.”
From his perch, Azzam envies the super fit elderly man who runs around Clapham Common each day, and often wonders with a glint of amusement what the dogs make of their owners diligently picking up after them.
He watches the latest exercise trends come and go with the seasons — the boxing or tai chi or, as with a few years back, “everybody standing on their heads”.
No surprises, though, that after a lifetime eschewing fleeting fashions, he isn’t inclined to join them.
Khaled Azzam concedes that he wouldn’t know what to do with spare time if he had any away from work. ‘I am blessed in my life because I do things I love,’ he says. Photo: Mark Chilvers
Dr Mohamed Ramy El Maarry hopes his example will lead next generation of Arab scientists into planetary studies.
A professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology has had an asteroid named after him in recognition of his achievements in astronomy.
Dr Mohamed Ramy El Maarry, an Egyptian associate professor of planetary science and director of the Space and Planetary Science Centre at Khalifa University of Science and Technology, received the accolade from the International Astronomical Union.
Asteroid 2002 CZ will now be known as (357148) El Maarry, in recognition of his contribution to the study of comets and planetary science.
“I feel humbled and privileged to get such an honour. In a sense, I look at it as a lifetime achievement award, something that’s going to remain as a legacy,” he said.
“I look at it as a form of extra motivation to do more work to impart the love of science and exploration to the next generation.
“I hope this award can be an inspiration to the next generation of Arab scientists.”
Dr El Maarry’s work in the field of cometary geology is what led to his nomination.
“These sorts of nominations and awards highlight the fact that there are Arabs and people outside of the US and Europe who do significant work in planetary science and they are acknowledged by the international community overall,” said Dr El Maarry.
“I hope it will give them [his students] that extra motivation to remove the stigma that this is the sort of science that is only done by Nasa and people in the West.
“We already know that the UAE is making leaps and bounds in their long-term plans, particularly with regards to space and exploration.”
Belting up for next mission
Dr El Maarry will also be representing Khalifa University as part of the UAE’s recently announced mission to explore the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
He said the mission was aiming to uncover more details about icy asteroids, which could lead to important clues about the formation of the solar system.
The mission would look to explore seven bodies in the asteroid belt, some of them unexplored, to try to better understand more about icy asteroids which could give important clues on how the solar system formed, he added.
“Our Earth Sciences department offers the only bachelor’s degree in Earth and planetary science in the region,” said Dr El Maarry.
“Our ambition is to prepare the next generation of Emiratis to take part in the upcoming UAE space missions, especially the UAE mission to the asteroid belt, which is due to launch in 2028.”
The mission will involve a five-billion-kilometre journey to perform fly-bys of six asteroids and then send a lander that will touch down on the seventh.
“The naming of the asteroid by the International Astronomical Union after our faculty marks a significant milestone for Khalifa University and the UAE,” said Dr Arif Al Hammadi, executive vice president of the university.
“The recognition also emphasises the globally relevant research that our world-class faculty takes up at Space and Planetary Science Centre in scientific exploration.”
Dr El Maarry’s research covers planetary surfaces and the physical processes that affect them, by using data analysis of remote sensing data, modelling, lab work and comparative planetology mainly through fieldwork.
He has played key roles in numerous international space missions over the past 16 years. His body of work includes Nasa’s New Horizons mission exploring Kuiper Belt Objects at the edge of our solar system, the emirates’ lunar missions , the upcoming ESA ExoMars Rover, Comet Interceptor, the planetary defence mission Hera, and the UAE’s mission to the asteroid belt.
His asteroid can be viewed in the Nasa Small Bodies Database. It is located in the inner asteroid belt, more than 300 million kilometres from the Sun. It orbits the Sun approximately once every three-and-a-half years, and should get closest to the Sun on August 11, 2024.
What is now the (357148) El Maarry asteroid was discovered in February 2002, through the efforts of a joint venture between the Department of Astronomy and Astronomical Observatory of Padova University and the German Aerospace Centre, Berlin.
Africa’s Business Heroes Competition saw strong participation by Egyptian entrepreneurs this year, reports Doaa A. Moneim from Rwanda.
Five Egyptian entrepreneurs made it to the top 20 finalists in the fifth edition of the Africa’s Business Heroes (ABH) Prize Competition held over two days in the Rwandan capital of Kigali this week.
One Egyptian entrepreneur, Ayman Bazaraa, CEO and co-founder of Egypt-based education and training services provider Sprints, has been selected in the top 10. He will compete in the grand finale to be held in Kigali next November.
The top 10 list also includes businesses from different African countries covering a wide range of sectors including healthcare, industry, retail, education and training, fintech, e-commerce, and sustainable energy.
The finalists are selected after demonstrating that they are visionary entrepreneurs who embody innovation, resilience, growth potential, and impact on Africa. ABH aims at honouring entrepreneurs who are not only building successful businesses, but are also running mission-driven organisations that generate growth for local communities.
Egyptian entrepreneurs have managed to keep their position among the top 10 winners since the launch of the first edition of the competition in 2019.
In the 2023 edition, five Egyptian entrepreneurs were praised for the innovative solutions they provide not just to the Egyptian market but also to the African and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) markets as well.
Speaking to Al-AhramWeekly, Bazaraa said that a significant share of Africa’s population is made up of young people, representing around 50 per cent of the population, and this represents great potential that Egyptian entrepreneurs must take into consideration for growth and for the benefit of the whole continent.
Sprints is an end-to-end platform dedicated to bridging the tech talent gap, starting from assessing talent, delivering a customised learning journey, and pairing talent with top-paying jobs, with the aim of supporting its alumnis’ career growth.
The African market can act as a key stimulator for global growth if its capabilities are seized, Bazaraa said. “Mastering tech-related skills is a must, and the huge African population of young people should get access to them to be able to find jobs at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening traditional jobs,” he added.
Sprints has focused on the Egyptian market with operations enabling it to conduct pilot studies for expansion plans in other African markets including Nigeria and Kenya. Its programmes are available online, which allows young people in other markets to access them.
Another Egyptian contestant, Mohamed Ali, CEO and founder of I Lock, works mainly in electrical safety with a range of products including electrical accessories, multi sockets and cables.
I Lock, known previously as Power Lock, protects individuals and machines from electrical hazards and creates innovative solutions. Through licensing its patented electrical safety technology, the company is also expanding its global presence and seeking to revolutionise electrical safety.
“The impacts of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine are the harshest entrepreneurs have had to face over recent years. Yet, we have managed to control the Covid-19 pandemic by adopting a working-from-home model,” Ali told the Weekly.
Ali said that soaring inflation, the weakness of the local currency against the US dollar, and the shortage of dollars in the Egyptian market had been hard for his business.
However, he expects the shortage of dollar liquidity to reflect positively on the Egyptian market as it could push Egyptian entrepreneurs to tap into local products that would contribute to mitigating the pressure.
“It could take a long time until the know-how mechanisms are comprehended and learned, but it will be a significant opportunity for entrepreneurs in various sectors to establish partnerships with big manufacturers to provide them with the components or products they need,” Ali said.
Mohamed Alaa, CEO and co-founder of healthcare services provider Shezlong, also inspired the ABH jury by his innovative business skills.
Shezlong is an online mental-wellness platform providing comprehensive and affordable healthcare services. The company’s systems and secure data encryption safeguard the quality and reliability of its services.
“We believe that through innovation mental wellness can be a daily routine for everyone in the region. It means changing people’s lives and saving their lives,” Alaa told the Weekly.
He added that the Shezlong team is working hard on geographical expansion as well as on leveraging advanced technologies, chiefly AI and machine learning, to provide a self-help app for clients.
Another contestant was Omar Hagrass, CEO and co-founder of Trella, a platform that connects shippers to carriers via a digital interface.
Trella matches specific carriers’ capabilities with shippers’ requirements to provide market-leading reliability and availability at a fraction of the market price. It also allows shippers to track shipments in real time and report key insights on transportation trends and performance.
“Our business is focusing mainly on transferring commodities 10 per cent more cheaply, and we plan to raise this percentage going forward,” Hagrass said.
He said there were significant challenges facing the entrepreneurship landscape, mainly the lack of financing, the devaluation of the Egyptian pound, and high interest rates.
“The soaring inflation, the higher interest rates, and the weakness of the local currency, and the highly active hard currency parallel market, represent serious challenges to entrepreneurs that could erode their businesses growth and expansion plans,” Hagrass said.
A fifth contestant, Mustafa Hashisha, CEO and co-founder of education and training solutions provider iSpark, said that the Egyptian market was full of potential that entrepreneurs could tap into to start their businesses.
iSpark provides mainly young people and women with career guidance and developmental opportunities with a focus on career coaching, employment skills, and entrepreneurship education.
“With reports revealing that an increased number of young people are either unable to make a career decision or want to change career paths, iSpark aims to solve this problem through its human-centred approach to design innovative learning solutions,” Hashisha explained.
He added that his business engages with more than 50 schools, over 30 universities, and over 10 development organisations.
The ABH Prize Competition is a philanthropic initiative launched in 2019 by the Jack Ma Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation.
A total of 79 scientists from Cairo University are among a list of 160,000 scientists whose practical opinions are cited in various specializations with a (2 percent).
President of Cairo University Dr. Mohamed Othman Elkhosht received a report on Stanford University’s announcement of a list of scientists whose practical opinions are cited in various specializations with a (2 percent), featuring about 160,000 scientists from 149 countries, based on the Scopus database, in 22 scientific specializations, and 176 sub-specialization for distinguished researchers.
Dr. Elkhosht announced that the Stanford list included a large number of Cairo University scientists, with a total of 79 scientists on the two lists, whether the total from 2011 to 2022, or the latest version 2023, as this year’s list included scientists from 11 colleges (an increase of 8% over the previous year).
Number of scholars featured from Cairo University in the report’s 2022 edition was 73 scholars, representing 9 of the university’s faculties, and compared to the number of 74 and 55 scholars during the previous years (2021 and 2020, respectively), Cairo University thus leads all Egyptian universities and research centers in all years from 2020 until now.
Dr. ElKhosht explained that the annual Stanford University report is an objective, external indicator of the progress of scientific research at Cairo University.
It is also a quantitative indicator for the university to identify the number of distinguished faculty members in research and a reflection of the university’s methodology, plan, applied practices, and the support that the university provides to its employees from the various colleges and institutes affiliated with it.
Dr. Mahmoud Al-Saeed, Vice President of the University for Postgraduate Studies and Research, pointed out that the report reflects the strengthening of the confidence of the international scientific and research community in our scientists in all fields and specializations, and that the results of the classification this year included two lists, the first of which is specific to the list of the total practical years 2011 – 2022 (with a total of 417 scientists), While the second included the list of last year, 2022, with a total of 817 scientists, adding that this year’s list (2023 edition) contained 926 Egyptian scientists, while last year’s list (2022 edition) included 680 Egyptian scientists from various universities and research centers, compared to 605 and 396 during the years 2021 and 2020, respectively.
Stanford University used the Scopus database of the international publisher Elsevier to extract various indicators in this list, including global scientific publishing, the number of citations, the H index, and co-authorship, all the way to the composite citation index.
source/content: egypttoday.com (headline edited)
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In her historical novel Cotissica, Ghada El-Absy depicts the story of the Greek adventurer and entrepreneur Theochari Kozzika (Egyptians pronounce the name in an Italian manner) and – in contrast – the life of a working-class Egyptian family.
Overwhelmed with dreams of wealth and prestige, Theochari arrives in Alexandria just after the Orabi Revolution (1879-1882) to live with his uncle Yanni and his wife.
Yanni does not help Theochari much except to give him advice, the most prominent is “middlemen are the new [Greek] gods.”
Theochari’s insatiable desire for money is evident when he allocates his uncle’s ships to repatriate Greeks from Alexandria during the bloody civil strife that erupted between foreigners and Egyptians in 1882 that culminated in the British bombardment of Alexandria and their ensuing conquest of Egypt.
El-Absy describes in detail an incident in which the British Consul’s Maltese servant, Francisco Zamit, starts a fight with an Egyptian coachman, stabbing him and taking shelter with the Maltese and the Greeks.
This is followed by fighting between the foreign communities in Alexandria, armed with pistols and guns, and Egyptians, carrying cudgels and sticks. The foreigners were driven by hatred and arrogance towards Egyptians, who in turn, felt humiliated in their own land until the Orabi Revolution awakened their wounded dignity.
One of the most unforgettable scenes in the novel is when a brave Egyptian man kills one of his countrymen who menaces a group of female Greek swimmers. The man leads the girls to safety, only to be shot by both the father and brother of one of the girls, who think that he is the one threatening them! One of the girls he saves, Angeliki, becomes Theochari’s wife later on and does charity, hoping to compensate the countrymen of this unknown hero.
Following the British occupation of Egypt, Theochari is joined by his younger brother, Polichronis.
Soon, Polichronis proved to be an indispensable partner for his elder brother through his exceptional skills in influencing and persuading people. Thus, Theochari decided to lay the plans and leave the execution of them to his younger brother.
Theochari took charge of providing the British troops with supplies during their Sudan campaign (1881-1899). He leaves Alexandria, establishing two factories in Tora, Cairo. One is for making alcohol for medical uses and the other is a brewery for making beer.
He makes the decision to move to Tora in order to be far away from both the greedy eyes of the British, who insist on taking a cut from every big business, and from the big Greek competitors, such as Gianaclis, owner of the famous wine factory.
El-Absy also provides a narrative from another universe, that of the family of Abdel-Alim, an Egyptian who works in Kozzika’s brewery.
This profession is a source of conflict within Abdel-Alim’s family. Whenever a male baby dies, his wife, Sabra, pours curses on him due to his profession, which is prohibited by Islam. In order to appease her, he gives her false promises that he will stop working in the brewery. He swings between staying and leaving until his best friend and co-worker takes him to hear a budding songstress, none other than Oum Kalthoum!
Abdel-Alim’s family is mired in superstitions and ignorance. For instance, Sabra asks a young man to put alms money, which she begged for, in a bundle and throw it in the street after walking for a while in order to make her son Talaat live, unlike his previous brothers.
El-Absy, who is a medical doctor, narrates an unbelievable story in which the jealous mother-in-law of Shawqia, Sabra’s most intimate friend and midwife, pays another midwife to let Shawqia’s baby die during delivery and then inserts a weasel into her womb to make her bleed and give her a hysterectomy.
Theochari and his brother begin to accumulate wealth, and all the while Abdel-Alim and his family are in a state of misery.
This misery is compounded by the inexplicable death of the husband of Abdel-Alim’s eldest daughter, Wedad, just ten days following the marriage. Following this calamity, Wedad resigns herself to sit beside the window for decades to become a clairvoyant. The rest of the daughters feel that their house is damned and join their mother in asking Abdel-Alim to stop working in the brewery so they can get married.
Throughout the novel, the author excessively merges Greek mythology with the minds, ideas, and words of Greek characters. For instance, after two and a half pages of engaging with and projecting mythological figures, the author says that Theochari was not that romantic!
El-Absy provides two friends and co-workers for Abdel-Alim: the Christian Anton and Samaan the Jew (this name is actually an error, as the Jewish name for Samaan is Sham’oon). These three characters are meant to convey the multi-confessional character of Egypt, with the three different religions working in the brewery in spite of it being taboo, at least for Muslims and Jews.
El-Absy, who is also a singer, devotes pages to Oum Kalthoum’s singing and the lyrics of her songs. It is this music that helps Abdel-Alim enter a phase of transcending intoxication and overcome his marital troubles.
However, one unconvincing scene is when Abdel-Alim, who is apparently illiterate, compares the establishment of the Tora Prison to the big prison in which Egypt is incarcerated.
The story of the Kozzika brothers continues through Theodore, Polichronis’ son. Theodore proves more than capable of managing the family business. He also has a much-publicized romantic affair with the American silent star Pearl White for the last ten years of her life.
Meanwhile, two of Abdel-Alim’s daughters marry, while the youngest, Set Abooha, shuns marriage, pursuing her studies and becoming a medical doctor. However, the only surviving son grows up, becomes a drug addict, kills one of his sisters, and steals her jewelry.
There are two scenes that were absolutely unnecessary. The first depicts Saad Zaghloul, the leader of the 1919 Revolution, in a dialogue with Sir Reginald Wingate, the British high commissioner. The second depicts Ahmed Aboud Pasha, the prominent Egyptian industrialist, talking to an unseen interlocutor about his career and his ambitions to seize the Kozzika brewery.
By this time, the winds had changed and the majority of foreigners had left Egypt after selling their businesses. This includes Theodore Kozzika, who sells his brewery and alcohol factory to Abboud Pasha, who converts them into a starch and glucose factory.
The novel consists of 35 chapters that are devoted either to the Kozzika or Abdel-Alim families, except in the final chapter where both families are mentioned together.
From the very first page, the author focuses on the mania of giving birth to male offspring among the Egyptian working classes represented by Sabra and her husband Abdel-Alim.
Ironically, the same tendency was also found in the Greek upper classes, albeit for totally different reasons, namely because the bride’s father paid the dowry.
This is demonstrated in a scene where Theochari’s wife, Angeliki, boils with jealousy when she learns that Polichronis’ French wife has given birth to a boy, while she gave birth to a girl.
Egyptian-American founder of Affectiva is on a mission to revolutionise the way we connect with our digital devices, and each other, by building in emotional intelligence.
The earliest memory that Rana El Kaliouby can conjure is of standing on a tiny blue plastic chair in a romper suit confidently declaring whatever was on her toddler mind at the time.
She is about three years old, revelling in her father’s attention as he dispenses tips – “look at the audience, enunciate your words” – and records the ramblings for posterity with the first commercially available home video camera.
These regular living room sessions led to El Kaliouby going on to give many accomplished public-speaking performances around the world as an artificial intelligence scientist and entrepreneur, most recently this month at the CogX Festival Deep Tech Summit in London.
Her big message after decades working in technology is that the final frontier lies at the point where AI can be immersed in emotional intelligence , or EI, to revolutionise the human-to-computer experience.
But it’s obvious that the first seeds of that life-fulfilling mission were sown more than 40 years ago in her childhood home in Kuwait where she was first encouraged to get to grips with ideas and machines.
“Our family is really big on education, the thing my parents invested in me and my sisters,” El Kaliouby, 45, tells The National.
“And because they were both in tech, we were always exposed to the latest and greatest gadgets. I was a big Atari game player,” she adds, laughing.
El Kaliouby looks back fondly on those clunky old VHS cassettes and hours the family spent playing Pac-Man as examples of the positive way in which electronic devices can bring loved ones together.
Less happy interactions with latter-day technology, however, brought about the realisation that something was missing – all the rich communication signals provided by non-verbal cues were being lost.
An enterprising mission
Her focus ever since has been on developing artificial intelligence that recognises facial expressions so that people can have better connections with their laptops, and, crucially, with each other.
Born in Egypt after her tech guru father, Ayman, met his future wife, Randa Sabry, on a university campus, it seems almost inevitable that El Kaliouby grew up to be a proud geek pursuing a career in computer science.
“It’s a cute story,” she says. “My dad was teaching COBOL programming, this obsolete language that nobody uses any more but was the programming language in the 70s.
“My mum, who was a business major, decided to explore this thing called computer science, and he was kind of interested in going out with her. She said, ‘I don’t do that. No dating allowed.’ And he was like: ‘Ok, then I’ll propose.’”
Soon after, the newlyweds moved to Kuwait, and her mother became one of the first female computer programmers in the Middle East, until having to flee when Saddam Hussein invaded.
Aiming for the stars
Next stop was Abu Dhabi, where El Kaliouby’s Muslim-Arab upbringing was conventional in many ways, bounded by “lots and lots” of rules that included not making any boy friends while at school.
“I always imagined walking around with a gold star on my forehead. I was a very nice, rule-abiding daughter. I stuck to the strict curfews. I never dated through high school or college and I think, by and large, I was always an A student.
“But, at the same time, it was very empowering. I have two younger sisters and the message was always: ‘You can do anything you want in the world.’”
She continued to meet these expectations into her early 20s, earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in Computer Science at the American University in Cairo, and marrying the founder of a start-up, Wael Amin.
Within a year, though, El Kaliouby was undertaking a PhD 5,000km away at Cambridge University despite both sets of parents saying: “Wait a second, you’re married now and you can’t leave.”
Amin, she says, deserves the credit for supporting her daring dream and agreeing to a long-distance relationship.
“It was really unheard of. I did break rules more as an adult as I explored my passions and my quest for being a researcher and an entrepreneur.
“That’s how I think I pushed the boundaries and definitely made my parents uncomfortable.”
And then? “I like the wording that my life went off the rails. I think that kind of encapsulates it.
“Cambridge opened my horizons. It’s like I discovered the world and it was hard to unlearn that.”
The enthusiasm for her life’s work comes across even through the medium of our Zoom interview, but it’s also clear that this was not an easy time.
El Kaliouby arrived in England a few days after the September 11, 2001 attack in America, a young Arab woman then wearing a hijab.
“I was visibly Muslim. My parents were very concerned about my safety.”
The perpetual smile she adopted by way of a peace offering was also something of a mask, hiding the loneliness and separation from those she loved.
Back then, the technological means for staying in contact across the distance was largely restricted to the kind of messaging that proved a barrier to expressing true feelings, making El Kaliouby all the more determined to humanise technology.
“My PhD was centred around building a machine with emotional artificial intelligence, and I recognised at the time that a lot of the ways I was communicating with my family back home, and especially my husband, was through chat.
“We didn’t have video communication and it was certainly very expensive to make phone calls so we would use texting.
“I often felt I could hide my emotions behind the machine. There were many days where I would be homesick or even in tears, but I’d never communicate that. The best I could do was send a sad face emoji.”
The personal hardships became a driving force for her work. In a career paved with “what if” moments, El Kaliouby began to ask: “What if we could teach technology to understand us in the same way that we understand each other?”
“It’s not even in the choice of words we use. It’s our vocal intonations, our facial expressions, our body posture – and all of that was just getting lost via digitally mediated communications.”
Life was about to take another decisive twist as she received an email that the scientist, inventor and entrepreneur Professor Rosalind Picard was coming to give a talk on campus.
El Kaliouby had long been an admirer of this trailblazing woman in an almost overwhelmingly male-led field, whose book on designing computers to recognise human emotions she read while still in Cairo.
Life-changing encounter
“I often say this is the moment that changed the trajectory of my life,” she says of Picard’s request to meet some of the students.
So impressed was Picard by this intense young woman that she offered El Kaliouby a post-doctorate place on the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab before their first 20-minute conversation had ended.
“I remember thinking, ‘But I need to go back to Egypt. I have this husband waiting for me.’ And she basically said, ‘Just commute from Cairo. Show up whenever you want to.’’’
By then, El Kaliouby had a daughter, Jana, born in the UK, and a son, Adam, arrived in that other Cambridge in the US, but the constant round trips were becoming unsustainable.
“I was just doing that crazy back and forth. I would say it was OK until it went insanely chaotic when I started the company.”
The company was Affectiva, founded with Picard in 2009 with the goal of creating a commercial applications of emotion-sensing AI.
Growth was fast and it was an exciting time but there was another, darker side. “I was travelling so much, there was very little presence in anything I did,” El Kaliouby says.
Big lesson learnt
“I feel like I was out of balance. I didn’t make any time to sleep well. I would wake up at three in the morning almost every day and fire all these emails to my team. And so these poor people would wake up at six or seven in the morning with a whole slew of notes from me.
“I would go on vacation with my husband and my two young kids, and I’d just be on call all the time. There were zero boundaries, zero balance, and that was a big lesson learnt. There’s always time for self-care. There should always be time to spend with family and loved ones and friends. And, I didn’t do that, you know?”
By 2016, she was a divorced mother of two young children living full-time in America, and decided to bare that vulnerability in her role as chief executive of Affectiva.
Staff could see on El Kaliouby’s calendar that 3.30pm was demarcated to collect her son from school, and she explained to them that a Zumba class each Friday ensured a happier, healthier leader.
“I think it made for a much more authentic environment,” she says.
The family now lives in what El Kaliouby describes as a charming New England home filled with distinctive Middle Eastern touches and often by the aroma of molokhia soup made to her mother’s recipe.
Love for Egypt
“It’s very modern but with a lot of Egyptian things, Arab and Islamic inscriptions. I think of myself as Egyptian American, and very Egyptian in a lot of ways. I love Egypt. A lot of qualities – the Arab warmth, generosity and even intimacy – that’s very much who I am and I would say it’s the same for my kids.
“But I also have embraced what people would call American values. I’m very ambitious, very driven, very globally minded.”
That ambition and drive has taken her far. Affectiva is employed by brands in about 90 countries for market research, but also helps children with developmental difficulties, such as autism , to better interact with those around them.
More recently, the company has developed technology to make driving safer by enabling cars to detect if a motorist is becoming drowsy or distracted.
It was acquired in 2021 by the Swedish AI giant SmartEye for what was said to be about $73 million, with El Kaliouby becoming deputy chief executive.
She has long predicted that the day will come when all devices have an emotion chip and we won’t remember what it was like before screens could comprehend the meaning of us frowning at them.
“When we first started doing this work, we always said this will become ubiquitous and ingrained in every technology. Now, I think it’s more true than ever because AI is becoming a lot more conversational and perceptual.
“You can imagine that the final frontier is this emotional and social intelligence. Initially, my work was very much around human-to-computer interaction, making machines more intelligent, and how they communicate with humans.
“Now it’s back to the human connection. How are AI assistants and AI technologies going to make us better humans, especially better at connecting with each other?”
Along the way, she has learnt that daily affirmations are as integral to life as algorithms, and celebrating the small achievements, such as growing her own tulips, is as important as publishing a best-selling memoir, Girl Decoded.
Among the accolades amassed, El Kaliouby can cite becoming a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, being listed on the Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech, and receiving the Smithsonian Magazine’s American Ingenuity Award in Technology. Earlier this year, she was invited to ring the opening bell on New York’s Nasdaq exchange as a female pioneer in AI, and was recently made a 2023 Eisenhower Fellow.
None of this seems to have gone to her head, however, perhaps because her family does a good job of keeping her grounded.
When El Kaliouby gave a TED Talk some years ago, she explained that in emotion science all facial muscle movements are measured as action units with specific numbers for each.
Words from the wise
In a throwback to those early guided sessions in the family living room in Kuwait, the night before she walked on stage, her daughter Jana, 12 at the time, helpfully texted: “Good luck mummy!! I’m sure your gonna do awesome. Remember: don’t play with your hair, connect with audience, give them a present, gesture on words, gesture to emphasise.”
The response sent in live time was the old-school emoticon but the algorithm that is El Kaliouby’s labour of love would have strongly detected action unit 12, the main component of, in this particular case, a very indulgent smile.
From her parting message to readers of The National, it is clear that she won’t rest until the technology responds just as accurately across the whole gamut of social and emotional states irrespective of people’s age, gender or ethnicity. Going forward, El Kaliouby insists, the watchword has to be inclusivity.
“I’m on this mission to diversify the face of AI. So it’s a call to action to get involved. It’s super exciting and we need a lot of diverse people being part of it.”
Egyptian architectural historian May El-Ibrashy is among the winners of the 2022 Prince Claus Impacts awards for her contribution and innovation in her community.
The Prince Claus Fund has announced on Tuesday the six recipients of the first 2022 Prince Claus Impact Awards.
The new award honours individuals whose work in art and culture engages their communities in innovative, positive ways while addressing issues of urgent contemporary relevance.
El-Ibrashy is an architect whose work centres on community engagement through heritage conservation, rehabilitation, preservation, and re-signification. She is the founder of the Megawra Built Environment Collective, a twinship between an architectural firm and an NGO.
Through her work she has managed to create a real difference for the often-marginalised communities living in Cairo’s historic centre and has created an important counter narrative to the current government’s focus on urban expansion and renewal, creating a new sense of hope and pride for the communities she works with.
Focusing on Al-Khalifa District in Sayeda Zeinab, Al-Hattaba district by the citadel, and Al-Imam Al-Shafii district, El-Ibrashy’s participatory conservation initiative is an inspiring successful community dialogue that has been going on for 10 years. The impact of the dialogue still resonates in the communities of Al Khalifa District, Al-Hattaba and Al-Imam Al-Shafii.
The other five recipients are:
Ailton Alves Lacerda Krenak (Brazil), an indigenous leader, environmentalist, and philosopher.
Alain Gomis (Senegal), a Senegalese-French film director and screenwriter.
Hassan Darsi (Morocco), a visual artist whose work promotes critical thinking about public spaces and citizenship.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (Cuba), an artist and human rights defender.
María Medrano (Argentina) is a writer, poet and editor.
The Awards Ceremony shall take place in the Royal Palace Amsterdam on the 7th of December.
Egypt’s Mayar Sherif continued her dominant rise in the tennis world at the BBVA Open Internacional de Valencia in Spain, winning the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) 125 title and leaping into the Top 35 world singles ranking for the first time.
This is also the tennis champion’s second consecutive WTA 125 title, having clinched the WTA 125 Makarska Open trophy in Croatia on 11 June.
Sherif enjoyed a winning streak throughout the tournament, eventually defeating Spain’s Marina Bassols Ribera 6-3, 6-3. With this victory, Sherif, now ranked 31st in the world, maintained her remarkable record in WTA 125 finals, extending it to 6-0.
“I came into this tournament with great momentum from Makarska, and I wanted to capitalize on it,” expressed Sherif after her dominant display. “Right from the beginning of the tournament, I felt very comfortable, and I believe that reflected in my straight-set victories throughout.”
With an astounding 9-place leap to 31st place in the singles world ranking, Sherif is now the highest-ranked Egyptian tennis player in history – surpassing the legendary Ismail El Shafei’s career-high of 34th place.
emoticon but the algorithm that is El Kaliouby’s labour of love would have strongly detected action unit 12, the main component of, in this particular case, a very indulgent smile.
