🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates.
Interviewer: It is a pleasure to welcome you Dr. Hasan, we are delighted to present you with the Prime Global Appreciation Awards in computer and information technology. To get started let me ask you after years of experience in academic education, and scientific research, can you tell us about your professional journey?
Dr. Hasan: As you have said I spent so many years in the education field, as a student first, then as a teacher, as a researcher. I changed throughout my life from Egypt "Cairo" to Syria. I taught in many unvisited, then I moved, like 20 years back, to UAE.
All of my experience was one part, and my experience in UAE is another part, which is the most important because in UAE I found that the education organization is very much connected to the whole world standards. For example, quality checks, and quality assurance, as the Ministry of Education has standards that are renewable, and after every few years they produce a new update for the education standards, and any education organization should follow those standards. This is itself, not an education, it is an observation to keep education healthy in this country. So, I feel proud, in fact, that I learned from this experience in UAE in both education and research.
Interviewer: why have you chosen the field of computer science and computer engineering? And why are you specifically interested in programming languages?
Dr. Hasan: You know that computers came into our lives in the 90s of the last century, and it changed our lives, for example, today you find banks insurance, offices, tourism, and business and all of them are relying on computers.
To make the computer useful, you have to program it, because from the computer's point of view if you ask the computer what is your daily work Mr. computer? The answer will be "garbage in, and garbage out" because the computer doesn't understand what is happening. So you have to program it, you have to make it work the way you want, and since that, there were programming languages like Fortran, and Cobol, and those were early languages. In fact, they have been developed into a high-level language, they were high-level in the past of course, but now a programming language like Python can help you to program net applications which is a cloud application, it can help you witting assembly which can go in details to control bytes and bits and bytes inside the memory to change the interface, the graphics. So for anybody interested to make this machine, the computer, to work in your favor then you have to program it. The ultimate today is the artificial intelligence program, which makes the computer make things on behalf of us! So it is a must for anybody who studied computers, to learn programming languages. That was the reason why I was interested in programming languages.
Interviewer: So please help me understand, how Artificial Intelligence impacts our daily lives? And how it is related to computer science?
Dr. Hasan: Artificial Intelligence is a creature, like us, and like a baby. As the baby goes through the teething stage and learning stage, Artificial Intelligence is still learning right now, and the latest version that we have called "3.5", actually "3.5" experience is limited to before 2022, because the database is the information bank that it has, and it is limited to that period. So, if you are asking the computer about the Ukrainian War, the computer will not answer you, because his database is limited to that particular time. So, I can say that Artificial Intelligence is in the learning stage, in the Alpha stage which has to be developed later. Version "4" is coming, and they will add more languages. For example, artificial intelligence, or ChatGPT, speaks about 85 languages right now, if you asked ChatGPT in Arabic, it will reply in Arabic too, so it is very flexible.
The impact on our lives will be like the impact of the early operating systems, which we don't want to talk too much about it. Microsoft itself or IBM when designed their first operating system called "360", it is a dream which means that it can answer everything, as when you go 360 degrees, then you will cover the whole space, but after one year it was proven that it couldn't cover everything because there were a lot of problems in the system, so they created another system called "370", and it doesn't exist!
But anyway, we are living at a time now where operating systems are more sophisticated than before. So many examples in the industry and even in the military field, that once a new product comes to market or to be used by people, it makes a big impact, and they will think it is the solution! But it is not, as long as there are programs and there are needs, we found that artificial inelegance will be developed more and more.
ChatGPT is a very good example that cannot draw a building layout because drawing is not one of its skills, but in any language, it can write a poem, a song, an essay, an article, or a CV. Even you can ask him to write your profile, and it will write for you but will write general information. So, what I feel is that ChatGPT just opened a door to a new creature that comes into our lives, who will be experimented with in each field, like industry, business, and governmental offices.
This creature can be sick sometimes, die, or it can survive for a long time, so right now we don't know further. The other bad side of artificial intelligence is that since it is a program, it means that it is fed with information stored in the clouds or the world's servers, and not all information is correct! some of the information is harmful to us, harmful to our traditions! So artificial intelligence doesn't have a verification tool, as intelligence means how to use information and logic at the same time, now artificial intelligence doesn't have logic, it does have only the information, some countries have banned ChatGPT because it might affect the traditions, and it might affect the creativity of people, as now you can poetry using ChatGPT, but without having the imagination and meanings.
Interviewer: Now can you tell us more about your collaboration with the European Space Agency "ESA" to extract the images from satellites, that sounds fascinating
Dr. Hasan: Yes, sure, the European Space Agency "ESA" they owned satellites that are doing surveillance and imaging of the globe. When it comes to Europe, Europe is most of the time covered by clouds, so normal cameras will not work to take images, or to take rain changes from one country to another, so they use an imaging tool, and they used radar. As we know that radar measures distance and it doesn't measure color. So as the satellite is moving will be measuring distance, and the distance is a number like "3520, 3521" and so on, so they have created images that are made in batches of 25 Kilometers by 25 Kilometers, and they made money out of it by selling it to the army, research centers.
After I finished my Phd., I was interested to further my knowledge, so I kept some relation with my university in England, the university provide me with the images, with these batches of maps, they called it maps but it is actually a series of numbers. How to convert those into something useful to us? So as I like programming, I wrote a very good program that reads these numbers and builds an axonometry for that, building a 3D image, so when you look at the computer screen after reading the maps, it represents it as a 3D image which is very good, I tried later to add colors, but I failed! and it was not easy for me, because radar pictures or radar information doesn't give a clue about the color of thigs, because you know colors could be green, could be brown or whatever, so that was an interest which was an answer for some questions in my mind and university's mind.
My study was given to another master's student to continue it. I was happy to see my name referenced as "Started by Dr. Hasan"