People

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Amin Allam

PhD Students

Introduction

I am a Ph.D. fellowship student in the Mathematical and Computer Sciences and Engineering (MCSE) Division at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), supervised by Prof. Panos Kalnis. I am a member of the InfoCloud group at KAUST, which work involves information management in large infrastructures. I am working in data structures and algorithms for manipulating very large string databases.

I am currently on academic leave from Cairo University, Egypt, where I work as a teaching assistant in the Computer Science department, Faculty of Computers and Information. I have extensive experience in algorithms and problem solving. I am interested in the following computer science areas; Discrete mathematics, Statistics, Algorithms, Data structures, Artificial Intelligence, and File structures. I am also fond of solving problems using exact and approximate algorithms, using fast optimized C++ programs.

I have participated in many algorithmic programming contests, which include achieving first place at the Programmer of the Month (POTM) contest (May 2005). I also managed to advance to the ACM-ICPC World Finals (2006). I am a highly ranked member in Topcoder Marathon Matches algorithmic contests, in which I get advanced places. Two of these contests are the AMD Multicore Threadfest 1​ contest (2008) and the CUDA Superhero Challenge 2 (2009). Recently, I achieved first place in the ACM SIGMOD Programming Contest (2012).

I received my Master's degree in Computer Science from Cairo University, Egypt in 2008, with a thesis titled An Arabic-Disambiguating Engine Based on Statistical Approaches. Previously, I gained a bachelor’s degree in Computers and Information from the same university. I had the distinction of being first in my class with 94.5%.

Research Interests

1) Algorithms and Data Structures for Indexing and Processing Large Databases.
2) Approximation Algorithms (for Computational Biology ..etc)
3) Artificial Intelligence (for Optimization Problems ..etc)
4) Statistical and Bayesian approaches (for Machine Learning and Prediction ..etc)

Selected Publications

​1) E. Mansour, A. Allam, S. Skiadopoulos, and P. Kalnis. "ERA: Efficient Serial and Parallel Suffix Tree Construction for Very Long Strings". PVLDB 5(1):49-60, 2011.
2) A. Fahmy, and A. Allam. "An Arabic-Disambiguating Engine Based on Statistical Approaches". 5th International Conference on Informatics and Systems (INFOS), Cairo University, P235-246, Giza, Egypt. Mar 2007.
3) F. Omara, and A. Allam. "An Efficient Tasks Scheduling Algorithm for Distributed Memory Machines with Communication Delays". Information Technology Journal 4(4): 326-334, 2005.
4) K. Shaalan, A. Allam, and A. Gomaah. "Towards Automatic Spell Checking for Arabic". 4th Conference on Language Engineering, Egyptian Society of Language Engineering (ELSE), P240-247, Cairo, Egypt. Oct 2003.

Awards

 
1) First place in ACM SIGMOD Programming Contest 2012 (Multidimensional Database Index).
2) Second place in CUDA Superhero Challenge 2 2009 (AI/Optimization).
3) First place in AMD Multicore Threadfest 1 contest 2008 (Scheduling).
4) Second place in ACM-ICPC Regional contest 2005, advanced to ACM-ICPC World Finals 2006.
5) First place in  Programmer of the Month (POTM) contest for May 2005 (AI/Optimization).