The University of Bahrain graduates its first batch of Masters in “Big Data”

The College of Science and College of Information Technology at the University of Bahrain recently celebrated the discussion of the Masters’ Theses for the first batch of graduates in Big Data Science and Analytics. The Master’s program, a first of its kind in the region was launched in the year 2019 by the University of Bahrain and approved by Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom.

The President of the University of Bahrain, Prof. Dr. Riyad Yusuf Hamzah, congratulated the graduating students, expressing his happiness with this achievement. He affirmed that the goal of establishing the Master in Big Data Science and Analysis program was achieved when the students successfully completed the program in 1.5 years as planned. He also noted that this reflects the successful management of the program and the effort made to follow up on student affairs and facilitate their academic concerns.

The University president added that, developing the program and receiving more higher education students confirms the prominent role played by the University of Bahrain. It also confirms the University’s ability to provide the Bahraini society with highly qualified graduates that are able to derive the national economy and open doors related to the Fourth Industrial Revelation, considering that Big Data is among the most prominent pillars of this Industrial Revolution.

From his side, the Dean of the College of Science Prof. Mohammed El-Hilo congratulated the students on their achievements and encouraged them to publish their work in collaboration with their supervisors. He also appreciated the great work of the program administrative committee under the leadership of Dr. Sawsan Hilal.

The masters’ theses discussion was organized over a period of three days (from March 29 to March 31, 2021) via Microsoft Teams. The theses that varied in topics, covering a wide range of practical fields – won the approval of the external examiners, where the quality of the submitted work reflected the students’ efforts and the skills and knowledge they gained through the program.

The first two theses on the topic of health data were presented by Maha Alanezi and Marwa Taher, and supervised by Dr. Ahmed Zeki. Alanezi’s thesis aimed at minimizing the loss function of annual neural networks (ANNs) in categorizing disease based on demographic and biochemical factors. While Taher’s thesis applied two data mining methods namely A-priori and FP-growth to discover associations within the medical health records.

The student Sadeq Jaffer worked under the supervision of Dr. Hesham Al-ammal and presented a thesis focused on finding appropriate mechanisms using deep learning in Artificial intelligence to automate video interview evaluations, which contribute effectively in the process of evaluating customer care employees and saving time and effort.

The student Sayed Qasim also worked under the supervision of Dr. Hesham Al-ammal presenting a study on how to use generative adversarial models (GAMs) in generating sensual and verbal expressions.

The student Zahra Shuaib who worked under the joint supervision of Dr. Riadh Ksantini and Dr. Jihene Kaabi recommended the development of the dynamic encoder process by replacing the classical dynamic encoder with a convolutional one, under the name Convolutional Dynamic Autoencoder.

The final student, Mohamed Almansoor, recommended under the supervision of Dr. Yousef Harrath, developing a solution that works in real-time for dealing with the problem of cash management problem for automatic teller machines.