As Qatar strives to achieve its Vision 2030 by building a knowledge based society, enabling scientific innovation becomes critical. Moreover, building research capacity in Qatar is transpiring through programs like NPRP that foster collaboration between Qatari researchers and scientists outside Qatar. Therefore, this project would clearly contribute to Qatar’s aspirations by equipping scientists with tools that enable easy management and sharing of large data sets, and facilitate collaboration among scientists.
The project will target domains that are relevant to Qatar and the region. In particular, we will initially focus on case studies from the biomedical sciences field, which has been identified as one of the three strategic focus research areas for Qatar (see the Potential Applications section). This work complements and contributes to a number of important ongoing national initiatives including the Qatar Cloud Computing center, the Qatar Computing Research Institute, the Qatar Biomedical Research Institute, and the Sidra Medical and Research Center.
The project does have an important educational component that includes student training, education and research. It is also expected that the project will lead to the introduction of modules in existing CS courses. Therefore, this effort contributes to building human capital in Qatar (the first stated objective of NPRP).