Dr. Abdelali Haoudi will promote research in biomedicine, energy, the environment and computer science at Qatar Foundation

Dr Haoudi teed up as research chief at Qatar Foundation in September 2007. He says his main objective is to coordinate and liaise between the many parties on the campus that have a research remit. The idea is to align projects with the foundation’s vision and build collaborative relationships.

“Research requires focus and clear objectives for what is predominantly a long term project. At Qatar Foundation, through our established partnerships and those yet to be made, we will as a team continue chipping away at our goals” he says.

Twenty budding entrepreneurs toasted their future ventures at the completion of QSTP’s first Investor Readiness Program on the 3rd of December. Meanwhile enrolment is already underway for the next course in February.

The program teaches the art of preparing and pitching winning business plans. Participants learn about key steps in the creation of a new technology businesses, such as selecting the right project from multiple options, building teams, and choosing the right investor.

The Investor Readiness Program is open to businesspeople, university students and anyone else in Qatar that wants to learn how to plan a start-up enterprise. Seminars are held one evening a week for six weeks, and there is no charge to participate.

Salah Afifi, a software analyst for Qatar Foundation, said the program had been invaluable in helping him gain an understanding of what to do next.

“Although I’d had ideas to start a business in my field of educational technology, they were just that, ideas. Through the program I have a clearer direction and I feel better prepared to take the next step in establishing my own business” he said.

QSTP‘s Des Ryan, who runs the Investor Readiness Program, said it has proved highly successful, from its early oversubscription to the quality of the participants.

ictQatar is trialing free public internet in 3 Doha parks

Go to three of the most beautiful parks in Qatar or walk along the Corniche these days, and you are likely to see people surfing the internet while soaking up the winter sun.

Companies across the Gulf are being encouraged to be more innovative, especially in their use of IT. But when it comes to developing and delivering new products, even large companies can struggle to take advantage of the latest computing power. That is about to change.

The Uptime Institute in the US is the arbiter of data centre ratings. The highest grade it currently awards is “Tier IV”, which is based on the data centre’s features such as security, disaster recovery, network redundancy and, as might be guessed from the institute’s name, its availability.
At the moment the only Tier IV data centres are in the US. But as the Gulf states invest their oil wealth into economic development, their IT infrastructure is leap-frogging much of the world. Both Qatar and Abu Dhabi are now building Tier IV data centres, with each having its own standards and specifications.

This June EDS signed a seven-year contract with Qatar Foundation, a national education and research institute, to deliver IT services regionally and be the “go to market” operator for the data centre. The foundation says the data centre, which will open in mid 2009, will be the first certified to Tier IV outside North America.

The IT facility will be located at Qatar Science & Technology Park, part of Qatar Foundation’s Education City campus. This is no coincidence. Not only is the science park a greenfield site – which allows it to be designed specifically to accommodate the data centre – the centre will support the research, development and commercialisation activities being promoted at Education City.

While out-sourcing IT makes sense for many corporate headquarters, it makes even more sense for their satellite R&D centres. It usually isn’t economical for such centres to maintain an advanced IT infrastructure, but because they are at the forefront of technology that is often exactly what they need. Data centres provide the answer.

For example, iHorizons is a Qatari software company that develops its own content management and e-business applications, and is now expanding into bioinformatics as well.

Qatar Foundation is setting up a Tier IV data centre that will help attract technology start-upsr

The company, which joined Qatar Science & Technology Park last December, could use the data centre’s storage and hosting services to handle these data-intensive applications.

Data centres are also good at handling one of the most critical functions in IT today – Internet search. iHorizons is part of a group building a dedicated Arabic search engine, and is looking to use the sheer processing power of the data centre for web-crawling and indexing tasks.

Meanwhile Shell, another member of the science park, installed its own subsurface computer node and data store at its temporary Education City location. This facility is being used to study and model hydrocarbon carbonate reservoirs in Qatar and the Middle East. Shell says the data centre project gives it the opportunity to grow its electronic infrastructure further.

While these are some of the uses envisaged today, the true value of data centres is their role as an “enabler”. Just as the internet and mobile phones spawned uses for which they were never originally intended, Qatar’s new Tier IV data centre provides basic infrastructure for IT entrepreneurs supporting its transformation into a knowledge economy.

Are you getting QSTP’s news and event alerts? If you subscribed to this newsletter before September, you might not have been given the choice of also getting our event notifications.

To check, just click on the “subscribe” button at the top or bottom of this newsletter. Enter your e-mail address in the pop-up window and then click “Get my profile”. Make sure “News and event alerts” is ticked.

Microsoft’s Image Cup 2008 encourages Qatar’s young technologists to bring their ideas to life

By Dzila Dik, Microsoft

Imagine a world where technology addresses a country’s literacy rate. A world where technology enables the blind or hearing impaired to read a book or speak up in class. A world where students explore, engage and interact regardless of geography or language.

Microsoft recently launched Imagine Cup 2008 at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and at Qatar University. The students’ excitement was reflected in the ample flow of registrations on the Imagine Cup 2008 website, www.imaginecup.com.

Now in its sixth year, Imagine Cup continues to challenge students around the globe to imagine a better world empowered by technology and created by their talent and innovation. The theme for this year’s competition is: “Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment."

More than 100,000 students from 100 countries competed in Microsoft Corp’s Imagine Cup 2007 competition, using their technology skills and talent to address these and many other education issues.

After advancing through the online, local and regional Imagine Cup competitions, qualifying students are scheduled to convene at the world championships in July 2008 in Paris to present their entries to judges. From the finalists, and a worldwide winner from each category will be announced. Prizes for Imagine Cup 2008 will total more than $180,000.

To participate in Imagine Cup 2008 and get additional information, visit www.imaginecup.com

By David A. Mundie, Q-CERT

The Dark Side of the Internet

It hardly needs saying that internet technology is revolutionizing our society, mostly for the better. But IT’s dark side is the vast opportunities it creates for malicious activity and catastrophic failure.

Many researchers believe that the ultimate solution is to stop producing software riddled with defects that allow malicious code to take over our systems. Examples do exist: OpenBSD is an operating system that has not had a single vulnerability detected in it for the last eight years.
One day we may move beyond the current cycle of defective code and aftermarket patches. In the meantime one of the most effective approaches is to create national Computer Security Incident Response Teams, or CSIRTs.

A Brief History of CSIRTs

In 1983 the protocols that underlie the internet were adapted, apparently with almost no regard for issues of security. Five years later the “Morris Worm” revealed how fragile those protocols were. A researcher accidently brought down the internet when he set the time delay for a program to a few milliseconds instead of a few minutes.

In response DARPA (the research branch of the US Department of Defense) and Carnegie Mellon University (which had played a hand in developing the internet protocols) formed the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT). Tom Longstaff, one of its original members, says that in the beginning the group was clueless. "We didn't know what to do about the problem, we didn't know how to go about finding out what to do about the problem, we didn't know who should be on the team. It was very exciting."

CERT has since found answers to all those questions and grown to 150 members. The key approach that it advocates is the formation of CSIRTs, and over the years CERT has helped in establishing CSIRTs all over the world. Almost two hundred teams are members of FIRST, the professional organization for CSIRTs.

Over time CSIRTs’ services have expanded, and many teams have moved beyond reactive incident response and offer proactive measures such as software selection, risk management, auditing, and awareness building.

The Origins of Q-CERT

In 2004 ictQATAR realised that without a secure, robust IT infrastructure, their plans for e-education, e-health and e-government would be hamstrung.

Q-CERT will relocate to QSTP after the science park’s new buildings open in mid 2008. The watchdog was initially staffed by CERT employees, but from the outset planned for all staff to be ictQatar employees within five years. The first Q-CERT employee started in February 2006, and the team has since grown to a staff of twenty-three.

Q-CERT in Action
So what does Q-CERT actually do, and who does it do it for? Because Q-CERT is a national team, its “constituency” is very broad. It encompasses virtually every internet user in Qatar, including schools, government agencies and private companies. Q-CERT’s services fall into three major categories:

Incident Management Team: Handles the technical aspects of information security. Reactively, it will assist members of its constituency to analyze and recover from security incidents (incidents can be reported at www.qcert.org ).

Proactively, it monitors public information sources for news and trends in information security threats. Q-CERT is particularly interested in monitoring of Arabic-language chat rooms where hackers hang out.

Critical Infrastructure Protection Team: Assists organisations to improve their IT security. Using Denning's Plan-Do-Check-Act paradigm, it helps organisations assess the risks to their information assets, implement changes to fill the gaps in their mitigation plans, and evaluate the effectiveness of those changes.

The CIP is taking a sector-based approach that has worked well in the US and elsewhere. For example it is assembling working groups in the oil & gas and financial industries to discuss sector-specific approaches.

Outreach and Training Team: Works with a broad range of constituents to raise awareness of cyber-security issues, and to teach the skills that are needed to deal with them.

At schools, it works with students, parents and teachers to demonstrate basic “internet hygiene”. It offers workshops for organisations’ IT staff, covering such topics as how to monitor and detect problems on corporate networks. And for the general public it provides easy-to-follow guides on how to protect computers in the home.

For more information: Visit Q-CERT’s website, www.qcert.org.

By Dominique Laurier, Total Research Centre Qatar

Total’s new lab at QSTP will help understand how Qatar’s gas reservoirs behave

Total is establishing a new organic geochemistry laboratory at their QSTP facility, the Total Research Centre Qatar, to conduct research and collaborative studies.

The lab will focus on carbonate reservoir fluid activities. It aims to better understand how – and more importantly where – oil and gas accumulated in Qatar’s reservoirs during different geological ages.

By Dr. Ruh Goh, Qatar Shell Research and Technology Centre

At QSTP Shell is developing ways to re-use water from the Pearl GTL plant

Qatar Shell Research and Technology Centre, a member of QSTP, has been ramping up its water-technology projects. In November it gave two lectures at Texas A&M University’s Qatar campus on water applications and management.

The first lecture focused on state-of-the-art developments in membrane technology, and was delivered by Dr. Arian Nijmeijer and Alfred Mutsaars from Shell’s Innovation and Research Department in the Netherlands. It described the rollout and prototyping of novel technologies stemming from the department's research.