Speakers’ Bios
Abdelaziz ABID |
| Senior Program Specialist, Information Society Division, UNESCO, France |
He served as Secretary-General of the National Library of Tunisia with teaching assignments at the Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA). Joined UNESCO in 1976 as a UNESCO expert and later as Chief Technical Adviser for the School of Information Science (ESI) project in Rabat, Morocco. This project was funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). He spent 9 years in Morocco as Professor and then Head of Department (Directeur des études) within the same institution. He joined UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in 1985 where he was in charge of library development projects and access to scientific information in developing countries. In 1988 he organized the international architectural competition for the Library of Alexandria, Egypt which was inaugurated officially only in 2002. He is now in charge of the "Memory of the World" Programme, which is a successful preservation and access initiative, as well as projects relating to libraries and access to information, digital heritage preservation, information literacy. He has traveled extensively all over the world, visiting about 70 countries. He co-ordinates joint IFLA/UNESCO library and information projects. He has contributed many publications in Arabic, English, French and Spanish on library development, information literacy, library education, access to scientific information, and preservation of, and access to, documentary and digital heritage. He has also edited a number of CD-ROMs as part of the "Memory of the World" Programme, especially within the framework of the Slave Trade Archives project. |
Sameh Alansary |
| Head of Arabic UNL center, The International School of Information Science (ISIS) Bibliotheca Alexandrina. |
Dr. Alansary is also a lecturer of computational linguistics in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University. He obtained his MA in Building Arabic Lexical Databases in 1996, and his PhD from Nijmegen University, the Netherlands in building a formal grammar for parsing Arabic structures in 2002. His main areas of interest are concerned with corpus work, morphological analysis and generation, and building formal grammars. He has many publications in the field of Arabic natural language processing. He is also a member in several scientific organizations including "Arabic Linguistic Society, Utah University, USA", "Association of Computational Linguistics, USA, Europe", "Universal Networking Language foundation, United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland". |
Darwish Al Gobaisi |
| Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Life-Support Systems (EOLSS), UNESCO, France |
He is actively engaged in research and development in an attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice, particularly in the aspect of plant modeling, simulation, optimization, control, fault diagnosis and care. He has authored/coauthored over 40 papers in the fields of power and desalination, water resources and environment. Presently he is leading a large team of internationally renowned experts, in a monumental project -The Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), as its Editor-in-Chief and Co-chairman of the UNESCO-EOLSS Joint Committee. This Encyclopedia is the largest online source of state-of-the-art knowledge in the world that was inaugurated at the World summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, South Africa in September 2002. Encyclopedia of Desalination and Water Resources (DESWARE) appeared in November 2000 as another unique online publication in the field of desalination and water resources. All these have been published by EOLSS Publishers, Oxford, UK. He has chaired technical sessions in several conferences both at home and abroad, and was the Technical Program Chairman of the IDA World Conference on Desalination and Water Sciences, Abu Dhabi, 18-24 November 1995. Dr. Al Gobaisi is a Chartered Engineer in the U.K.; Fellow of the Institute of Electrical Engineers (U.K.); Fellow of the Inst. of Measurement and Control (UK); Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (UK); Senior Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Member, Operations Research Society of America; Member, Institute of Forecasters; Member Instrument Society of America; and Member, International Desalination Association, where served also on its Board of Directors. He has been recently elected to the Royal Belgian Academy of Overseas Sciences as Corresponding Member. |
Mustafa El Tayeb |
Director of the Division for Science Policy & Sustainable Development at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). |
Dr. El Tayeb holds an Engineering Diploma from St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Mining Institute, a Master and a PhD in Geophysics from Bordeaux I University in France. He started his career in 1974 as a mining engineer/ geophysicist at the Geological Survey Department of Sudan. His work covered the utilization of geophysics to civil engineering works, engineering geology and the exploration of mineral resources in the various regions of the country. Between 1976 and 1980, he worked as a researcher in the Red Sea. His research covered areas such as marine seismic reflection, airborne gravity and magnetic surveys of the central Red Sea, development and adaptation of the shallow water seismic techniques to deep-sea research. Dr. El Tayeb joined UNESCO in 1981 as a programme specialist in charge of the development of scientific research and higher education in the Arab region. In 1986, Dr. El Tayeb assumed the post of the Chief of Section responsible for the Arab States and then became responsible for both the Arab States and Africa Sections. During this period, he supervised the development of a number of national S&T plans and projects. Between 1989 and 1996, he worked as the Chief of Development Analysis and Operations. His functions included assistance to UNESCO Member States in formulating science policies, strategies as well as the development of partnerships between universities and industries and the evaluation of higher education institutions and universities. In 1996, Dr. El Tayeb was appointed Director of the Division of Policy Analysis & Operations of UNESCO and given the task of building UNESCO’s capacity in this area. Since then, UNESCO reinstated the programme of science technology and innovation policies. The Division of Science Analysis & Policies launched an ambitious programme of assistance to Member States in the evaluation of their national systems of innovation. Several International/regional conferences, workshops and symposia were organized to disseminate best practices in this area. |
Tarek Kamel |
| Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Egypt |
His Excellency Dr. Tarek Kamel was appointed the Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Egypt in July 2004, where he is responsible for enhancing, developing and crystallizing the Egyptian Information Society and the Egyptian ICT Sector as a whole. During the period from October 1999 to 2004, he held the post of a senior advisor to the Minister of Communications and Information Technology where he lead the formulation and implementation of a series of successful nationwide initiatives, that serve Egypt’s national plan of “Building its Information Society”, namely the IT Clubs Initiative (January 2000), the Free Internet Initiative (January 2002), the PC for Every Home Initiative (December 2002), and the Broadband Initiative (May 2004). As a result of his continuous and substantial contributions to the Egyptian ICT Society he was chosen as board member of Telecom Egypt in the year 2000. Moreover, His Excellency's pioneering efforts in several distinguished ICT associations and institutions led to his assignment as Vice President and member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society (ISOC) in Virginia from May 1999 to May 2002, meanwhile being a professor of Computer Networks at the Electronics Research Institute and serving as the secretary of the Egyptian Internet Society. His Excellency was appointed Manager of the Communication and Networking Department at the Cabinet Information & Decision Support Center (IDSC/RITSEC) 1992-1999, based on his strong academic background represented in his fellowship Ph.D., acquired from the German Academic Exchange (DAAD) at the Technical University of Munich, 1989-1992. During 1992-1993, he initialized Egypt’s first connection to the Internet, and steered the introduction of commercial Internet services in Egypt. |
Vladislav Kotchetkov |
| UNESCO Consultant France |
Dr. Vladislav Kotchetkov graduated from the Moscow Higher Technological University in 1959 and worked on satellite and missile technology. In 1969 he was awarded the USSR Laureate State Prize. He received a diploma Cum Lauda in international economics from the USSR Foreign Trade Academy in 1977, and worked as a Director of a Division of International Scientific and Technological Co-operation for the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology. He was involved in the preparation of the 1979 United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD), was a Secretary of the USSR Preparatory Committee for UNCSTD, represented the country at the sessions of the UNCSTD Preparatory Committee, was elected as a Rapporteur at the European Regional Conference for UNCSTD in Bucharest in 1978 and participated in the Vienna Conference in 1979. From 1980 he has been working for the UNESCO Science and Technology Policy Division, was a Chief of the UNESCO Science, Technology and Society Programme and a UNESCO representative at the UN inter–Agency Task Force on Science and Technology for Development. He also served as the Executive Secretary of the Moscow International Energy Club and the UNESCO International Council for Scientific Communication, represented UNESCO at the IUCN Commission on Education and Communication. He is a member of the UNESCO-EOLSS Joint Committee. |
Hassan Nadir |
| President of Alexandria University, Egypt |
 Dr. Hassan Nadir is the president of the Alexandria University. He is responsible for providing an efficient environment for a large sector of youth who join the colleges every year. Dr. Nadir supervises all the technical and financial aspects of the Higher Education Enhancement Projects at Alexandria University.Dr. Nadir is currently contributing in several projects that aim to enhance the the educational system of the university and works on introducing Information Technology strategies in all the colleges. Among these projects are the preparation and implementation of Management Information System (MIS) at the Faculty of Engineering, and preparation of Quality Assurance Strategic Plan for the University. Dr. Hassan Nadir was born in Alexandria, Egypt. He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University, Canada. He is specialized in microwave communications. Prior to being the President of Alexandria University, he was the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Beirut Arab University. In 1991, he received the University Award for Scientific Encouragement. He has numerous publications in the field of education development as he published 47 papers in periodicals and local and international conferences, eight of them are papers in development of the education process |
Ronaldo Martins |
| Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Mackenzie University, Brazil |
He has been also involved in several machine translation and information retrieval projects taking Portuguese as the source or the target language. |
Magdy Nagi |
| Head of the Information and Communication Technology Sector, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt |
On the national level he was a Consultant to many projects under the umbrella of either the University of Alexandria or the Faculty of Engineering for designing and/or implementing automation projects for governmental authorities or public sector companies, such as the Ministry of Interior, the Health Insurance Organization (HIO), the Social Insurance Organization (SIO), and the Customs Authorities. Since 1995, Dr. Nagi has served as Consultant to Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Among his activities are the design and installation of Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s network and its information system as well as the design and implementation of the library information system, namely a trilingual information system that offers full library automation. He is currently serving as the Head of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Sector and the Director of the International School for Information Science (ISIS) at Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Dr. Nagi is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society as well as several other scientific organizations. His main research interests are in operating systems and database systems. He is author/co-author of more than 80 papers. |
| Tarcisio Della Senta |
| President of the Universal Networking Digital Language Foundation (UNDL), Switzerland |
In his professional life, Prof. Senta has been associated with the world of knowledge. With a Doctor degree from Harvard and a Master’s from the Institut Catholique de Paris, he crosses various intellectual disciplines and cultural environments. He worked as university professor and served in high-level functions, both within the Ministry of Education and at the National Council of Science and Technology in his home country, Brazil. He is author/co-author of three books: “UNL, a Gift for a Millennium”, UNU/IAS, 1999; “Access to Knowledge, the Emergence of the Virtual University”, Oxford University Press, 2000; “No Matter, Never Mind”, Johan Benjamin Publishers, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2002. |
| Ismail Serageldin |
| Director, Library of Alexandria, Egypt |
Previously he served as Vice President of the World Bank (1992-2000), Chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR, 1994-2000), Chairman of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP), a micro-finance program (1995-2000), Chairman of the Global Water Partnership (GWP, 1996-2000), and Chairman of the World Commission for Water in the 21st Century (1998-2000). Dr. Serageldin worked in a number of capacities at the World Bank (1972-2000) and has published and lectured widely. He holds a Bachelor of Science in engineering degree from Cairo University, and a Masters' degree and a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has received 15 honorary doctorates. Dr. Serageldin currently serves as Distinguished Professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and as chair and member of a number of advisory committees for academic, research, scientific, and international institutions and civil-society efforts. He has written more than 50 books and monographs (edited or authored) and 200 articles, book chapters, and technical papers on various topics. |
| Hiroshi Uchida |
| Director Universal Networking Language Center, Universal Networking Digital Language Foundation Japan |
Dr. Hiroshi Uchida had many publications in this field. Among his contributions are “A Machine translation System from Japanese into English based on Conceptual Structure. COLING-80, 1980” , “Automated Translation of Japanese Kana Input into Mixed Kana-Kanji Output, FUJITSU Scientific & Technical Journal,Vol.15, No.2, 1979” , “Electronic Dictionary. Proceedings of International Workshop on Electronic Dictionaries, 1990”, “Necessity for Interlingua for Multilingual Translation. MT Summit Manuscripts, 1987” and many other contributions. |
Meiying Zhu |
Deputy Director of Universal Networking Language Center, Universal Digital Language Foundation Japan |
Dr. Meizing Zhu has many publications in the field among which are: "Interlingua, International Symposium on Multilingual Machine Translation '90, 1990, co-author with Hiroshi Uchida", "Interlingua for Multilingual Machine Translation, Proceedings of MT Summit IV, 1993, co-author with Hiroshi Uchida", "A Gift for a Millennium, UNU/IAS, co-authors with Hiroshi Uchida and Tarcisio Della Senta", "UNL - Universal Networking Language, UNDL Foundation, 2005, co-author with Hiroshi Uchida and Tarcisio Della Senta". |
Abdelaziz Abid graduated from the University of Tunis in 1970 with a Bachelor Degree from the Faculty of Humanities and the Teachers College (Ecole Normale Supérieure). In 1973 he graduated from the University of Montreal, Canada, with a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science. 
Dr. Alansary is supervising and managing the computational linguistic aspect of the Universal Networking Language (UNL) project at Bibliotheca Alexandrina since June 2005. 
Dr. Darwish Al Gobaisi was born on the 21st December 1953 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. He received his higher technical education in Electrical Engineering from the United Kingdom where he received his B.Sc. (Engineering) and Ph.D. degrees. For over two decades since 1976 he was with the Water and Electricity Department (WED), Government of Abu Dhabi, in various positions including Director General, Power & Desalination (P&D) Plants, directing all aspects of activity including planning, development, operation and maintenance of P&D plants. He was responsible for the continuing development of the P&D facilities over the years, the capacity of which at present has reached 3000 MW and 200MGD respectively. 
He is a Founding Member of the Arab Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Science (Belgium), the Secretary of the UNESCO-EOLSS Joint Committee in charge of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems and Editor-in-Chief of the UNESCO Science Report.
Ronaldo Martins has been responsible for the development of the UNL Portuguese System since 1997. As former contributor to the UNL Center and director of the UNDL Institute in Brazil, he has been working with UNL mainly as an information retrieval technology. He has developed the UNL WordNet database and currently leads the XUNL (eXtended UNL) Project. 
Dr. Nagi is a Professor in the Computer Science department, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Karlsruhe, in 1974, where he served as Lecturer for two years and as a Consultant to its Computer Center from 1974-1990. During this period he also served as Consultant to many companies in Germany such as Dr. Otker, Bayer, SYDAT AG, and BEC.
Prof. Della Senta is the President of the UNDL Foundation, a non-profit organization established in Geneva. Prof. Della Senta has been with the United Nations University in Tokyo as the Director of Planning and Development, as Vice-Rector and as the founding Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University , in Tokyo (1995 - 2000), where the Universal Networking Language (UNL) was born.
Dr. Serageldin is the Director of the newly established Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and chairs the Boards of Directors for each of the seven research institutes and three museums affiliated to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Dr. Hiroshi Uchida is the director of the UNL center at the UNDL Foundation since 2001. He started his career in 1971 at Fujitsu Laboratories LTD. He worked there until 1994. He was also the manager of the Natural Language Processing section at the Software Laboratory. From 1988 till 1993 he worked as the manager of the Machine Translation Laboratory; researching and developing for the multilingual machine translation system for Asian Languages, he also worked on the development of electronic dictionaries for natural language processing Center of the International Corporation for Computerization (CICC). In 1994, he worked as a lecturer at the Gakushuuin University. In 1990 he became the Director of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory and in 1991 he became the director of the Knowledge Processing Laboratory. On the other hand, he has been the president of the Libra Corporation since 1994. 
Dr. Meiying Zhu is the deputy director of the UNL center at the UNDL Foundation since 2001. She has been involved in researches concerned with Natural Language Processing since 1986 at Fujistu Laboratories where she worked until 1994. At the same time she worked for the Multilingual Machine Translation project for Asian languages at the Center of the International Cooperation for Computerization (CICC). In this project, she was especially engaged in the research of Interlingua. In 1995, she became the executive director of Libra Corporation where she worked on the research and development of the Dictionary Systems, Language Generation, and Language Analysis Systems which were used afterwards to improve UNL programme. From 1996 till 2000, she worked as research manager at UNU/ IAS, and in 2004 she became Senior Special Fellow of UNITAR.