Rayyan Project Former Members, Contributors and Interns
Dr. Mourad Ouzzani was the project lead of Rayyan and is a principal scientist in the he Data Analytics at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. Before that, he was a Research Associate Professor at Purdue University. Mourad conducts research in data integration, data quality, spatio temporal data management, and database systems for scientific data. Mourad has published extensively in top database venues including SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE.
Hossam Hammady was the Lead Software Engineer for Rayyan at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. He is currently appointed as the Vice President of Engineering at Rayyan Systems, Inc. He has more than 17 years of experience in software development across a diverse set of platforms. His current focus is on the architecture and DevOps of large-scale web applications. Hossam is also an open source enthusiast and has numerous contributions on Github. He received a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from the Arab Academy for Science and Technology (2009) and a Bachelor degree in Computer Science from Alexandria University (2004).
Dr. Ahmed Elmagarmid is the inaugural executive director of the Qatar Computing Research Institutei and a member of the Data Analytics group at QCRI. Before joining Qatar Foundation in 2010, he was founder and director of both the Cyber Center in Discovery Park and the Indiana Center for Database Systems at Purdue University. He was a full professor of computer science at Purdue, where he had been actively involved in teaching and research for 22 years. Early in his career he received the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator award from President Ronald Reagan. The University of Dayton and Ohio State University have both named him among their distinguished alumni. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and is a member of Sigma Xi American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr Elmagarmid has chaired and served on several program committees and editorial boards. His expertise spans foundational and application-oriented database research. Dr. Elmagarmid sits on the Meeza board of directors.
Fadhil Abubaker is part of the Software Engineering Team at Qatar Computing Research Institute. Fadhil graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar in 2018 with a B.Sc. in Computer Science.
Dr. Kareem Darwish is a principal scientist in the Arabic Language Technologies at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. Kareem helped in designing the SVM classifier behind Rayyan’s rating system.
Project Consultant – Dr. Zbys Fedorowicz is director at Veritas Health Sciences Consultancy and member of the council of governors at North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust. He was the Director of the Bahrain Branch of the UK Cochrane Centre. Zbys graduated from the Royal Dental Hospital of London in 1971. His clinical experience includes postings in Holland, South Africa and over the last 30 years in the Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia & Bahrain).
Project Member – Dr. Ihab Ilays has participated in the initiation of the Rayyan project. Ihab is a full professor at the University of Waterloo.
Research Associate – While a PhD student at Penn State, Madian worked on a machine learning algorithm for classifying relevant studies. He is now part of the Knowledge and Technologies group at Microsoft Research, Redmond.
Research Associate – Cheng is a PhD student at Penn State. He worked on the risk of bias analysis and full text upload in Rayyan.
Research Associate – Tanay is a PhD student at IUPUI. He worked on several aspects of Rayyan including full scale evaluation of the prediction module for included/excluded module inside Rayyan, proposing a novel model for the prediction based on multiple learners and word2vec features, and improving the deduplication of citations inside Rayyan.
Undegrad Intern – Fikri is a student at Multimedia University (Malaysia). He worked on adding a forum and a new format (Web of Science/CIW) to Rayyan.
Undergrad Intern – Nikil is an undergraduate student studying Computer Science and Mathematics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was responsible for designing and implementing the personalized user notes feature.