Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Addressing linguistic complexities, the scarcity of high-quality datasets, and other challenges is crucial for advancing Arabic text-to-speech technology. Voice-generation technology enables machines to synthesize human-like speech--text-to-speech (TTS)--revolutionizing digital communication by fostering more inclusive and accessible experiences. What began as simple robotic speech synthesis has evolved into highly sophisticated voice-cloning systems that can produce natural, coherent, expressive, and personalized voices using minimal data. These technologies empower individuals with cross-lingual communication through virtual agents, assist in overcoming visual or speech impairments or literacy challenges via assistive tools, and support educators and industries such as entertainment with creative content generation.

The 2023 Türkiye-Syria earthquakes, also known as the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, were two catastrophic events that struck nine hours apart on February 6, 2023, with epicenters in the Pazarcık and Elbistan districts of Kahramanmaraş, and magnitudes of 7.8 Mw and 7.5 Mw, respectively (see Figure 1).

Thanks to advancements in speech and natural language processing, there is hope that one day you may be able to ask your virtual assistant what the best salad ingredients are. Currently, it is possible to ask your home gadget to play music, or open on voice command, which is a feature already found in some many devices. If you speak Moroccan, Algerian, Egyptian, Sudanese, or any of the other dialects of the Arabic language, which are immensely varied from region to region, where some of them are mutually unintelligible, it is a different story. If your native tongue is Arabic, Finnish, Mongolian, Navajo, or any other language with high level of morphological complexity, you may feel left out. These complex constructs intrigued Ahmed Ali to find a solution.

If you drive in the United States, chances are you can't remember the last time you bought a paper map, printed out a digital map, or even stopped to ask for directions. Thanks to Global Positioning System (GPS) and the mobile mapping apps on our smartphones and their real-time routing advice, navigation is a solved problem. If you live in a place like Doha, Qatar, where the length of the road network has tripled over the last five years, commercial mapping services from Google, Apple, Bing, or other providers simply can't keep up with the pace of infrastructure change. "Each one of us who grew up in Europe or the US probably cannot understand the scale at which these cities grow," says Rade Stanojevic, a senior scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University, a Qatar Foundation university, in Doha. "Pretty much every neighborhood sees a new underpass, new overpass, new large highway being added every couple of months." As Qatar copes with this rapid growth--and especially as it prepares to host the FIFA World Cup in 2022--the bad routing advice and accumulating travel delays from outdated digital maps is increasingly costly. That's why Stanojevic and colleagues at QCRI decided to try applying machine learning to the problem. A road network can be interpreted as a giant graph in which every intersection is a node and every road is an edge, says Stanojevic, whose specialty is network economics. Road segments can have both static characteristics, such as the designated speed limit, and dynamic characteristics, such as rush-hour congestion. To see where traffic really is going--rather than where an old map says it should go--and then predict the best routes through an ever-changing maze, all a machine-learning model would need is lots of up-to-data data on both the static and dynamic factors. "Fortunately enough, modern vehicle fleets have these monitoring systems that produce quite a lot of data," says Stanojevic.

What is new is how quickly malicious actors can spread disinformation when the world is tightly connected across social networks and internet news sites. We can give up on the problem and rely on the platforms themselves to fact-check stories or posts and screen out disinformation--or we can build new tools to help people identify disinformation as soon as it crosses their screens. Preslav Nakov is a computer scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute in Doha specializing in speech and language processing. He leads a project using machine learning to assess the reliability of media sources. That allows his team to gather news articles alongside signals about their trustworthiness and political biases, all in a Google News-like format. "You cannot possibly fact-check every single claim in the world," Nakov explains. Instead, focus on the source. "I like to say that you can fact-check the fake news before it was even written." His team's tool, called the Tanbih News Aggregator, is available in Arabic and English and gathers articles in areas such as business, politics, sports, science and technology, and covid-19. Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, editorial director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Qatar Foundation. "Even the best AI for spotting fake news is still terrible," MIT Technology Review, October 3, 2018 Laurel Ruma: From MIT Technology Review, I'm Laurel Ruma, and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.

Arabic poses a set of unique speech recognition challenges due to its rich dialectal variety.

From Hammurabi's stone tablets to papyrus rolls and leather-bound books, the Arab region has a rich history of recordkeeping and transactional systems that closely matches the evolution of data storage mediums. Even modern-day data management concepts like data provenance and lineage have historic roots in the Arab world; generations of scribes meticulously tracked Islamic prophetic narrations from one narrator to the next, forming lineage chains that originated from central Arabia. Database systems research has been part of the academic culture in the Arab world since the 1970s. High-quality computer science and database education was always available at several universities within the Arab region, such as Alexandria University in Egypt. Many students who went through these programs were drawn to database systems research and became globally prominent, such as Ramez Elmasri (professor at University of Texas, Arlington), Amr El Abbadi (professor at University of California, Santa Barbara), and Walid Aref (professor at Purdue University).

The world is facing enormous challenges, ranging from climate change to extreme poverty. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)a were adopted by United Nations Member States in 2015 as an operational framework to address these challenges. The SDGs include No Poverty, Quality Education, Gender Equality, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, among others, as well as a meta goal on Partnerships for the Goals. Despite limitations,7 the SDGs form a rare global consensus of all 193 UN member states on where we should collectively be heading. Goals are meaningless without a way to track their progress. Data on the SDGs and the associated indicatorsb are often outdated or unavailable, hindering progress during the Decade of Action leading up to 2030.c

The Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) is one of three national research institutes established in 2010 by Qatar Foundation (QF) for education, science and community development. It operates under the umbrella of Hamad Bin Khalifa University and is steered operationally by the Research, Development, and Innovation (RDI) division, which was established within QF to oversee the three national research institutes' day-to-day operations. In this capacity, RDI provides high-level planning, coordination, and oversight to further the institutes' research priorities. QCRI was created with a mandate to support Qatar's transformation from a carbon economy to a knowledge-based economy. In doing so, it fulfills Qatar Foundation's overarching objectives of enabling national and regional change.

On December 2, 2010, Qatar was announced to host 2022 FIFA World Cup. That was time for celebrating the first-ever Middle Eastern country to organize the tournament. The 1.8M population of Qatar then (2.8M today) never imagined the journey their country was about to embarked. Indeed, in less than 10 years, the population grew by more than a half, pushing the available urban resources and services to their limit. At the same time, the country undertook an ambitious investment plan of $200B on various infra-structural projects including a brand new three-line metro network, six new stadiums, several new satellite cities, and an astonishing 4,300km of new roads, which tripled the size of the road network in only five years.3