Nabil Ali Mohammed Abd AL Azeez (

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

: نبيل علي) (3 January 1938 – 27 January 2016) was an Egyptian scientist, writer, and intellectual who worked in the field of

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

and

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

. Ali is considered a pioneer of Arabic language computing, making significant innovations in early computational linguistics.

Education and career

Ali earned a

bachelor's degree A bachelor's degree (from Medieval Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six years ...

Aeronautical Engineering Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is s ...

in 1960, and a

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional prac ...

in 1967. In 1971, he earned a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in Aeronautics. From 1961 to 1972 Ali worked as an engineering officer in the

Egyptian Air Force The Egyptian Air Force (EAF) () is the aviation branch of the Egyptian Armed Forces that is responsible for all airborne defence missions and operates all military aircraft, including those used in support of the Egyptian Army, Egyptian Navy ...

, specializing in maintenance and training. In 1972, he shifted focus to computing, and from 1972 to 1977 he worked as a computer manager at Egyptair. While in this position, Ali introduced the first automated reservation system for airlines in the

Arab world The Arab world ( '), formally the Arab homeland ( '), also known as the Arab nation ( '), the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, comprises a large group of countries, mainly located in West Asia and North Africa. While the majority of people in ...

. He later held various computing positions in Egypt,

Kuwait Kuwait, officially the State of Kuwait, is a country in West Asia and the geopolitical region known as the Middle East. It is situated in the northern edge of the Arabian Peninsula at the head of the Persian Gulf, bordering Iraq to Iraq–Kuwait ...

, Europe, Canada and the US. Ali started working for Sakhr Software, an Arabic language technology company, in 1983. From 1985 to 1999, he was vice president of Sakhr's council for Research and Development. As a director of the Multilingual Advanced Systems Foundation and project manager at the Egyptian National Company for Scientific and Technical Information, Ali did extensive research on information culture and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

relating to the Arabic language. Over the course of his career, Ali developed more than 20 educational programs relating to computational linguistics. He developed the first Arabic

lexical database In digital lexicography, natural language processing, and digital humanities, a lexical resource is a language resource consisting of data regarding the lexemes of the lexicon of one or more languages e.g., in the form of a database. Characteris ...

and the first knowledge base for Arabic poetry, as well as many other pieces of Arabic language software.

Awards

* 1994: General Book Authority Award for Best Book (in the field of future studies). * 2003: General Book Authority Award for Best Culture Book (in the field of "Challenges of the Information Age"). * 2007: General Book Authority "Innovation in Information Technology" Award. * 2012: King Faisal International Award, with Professor Ali Helmy Mousa, in the field of computer processing of the Arabic Language.

Works

* Arabic Language and Computer (Research study), Dar Localization, 1988. * Al Arab and the Information Age, Knowledge World Series No. 184, April 1994. * Arab Culture and the Information Age: A Vision for the Future of Arab Culture Discourse, World of Knowledge Series, No. 265 January 2001. * The Digital Gap: an Arab Vision for a Knowledge Society (in partnership with Dr. Nadia Hegazy), World of Knowledge Series, No. 318 August 2005. * The Arab Mind and the Knowledge Society: Manifestations of the Crisis and Suggestions for Solutions, Part 1, The World of Knowledge Series, No. 369, November 2009. * The Arab Mind and the Knowledge Society: Manifestations of the Crisis and Suggestions for Solutions, Part 2, The World of Knowledge Series, No. 370, December 2009.

Tribute

On 3 January 2020, Google Doodle celebrated Nabil Ali Mohamed's 82nd Birthday.

References

External links

Arab Sites and Their Place in the Era of Information Culture
– Nabil Ali, Expert in Information Technology and Computational Linguistics, Without Borders Program, 23 March 2001. {{DEFAULTSORT:Ali, Nabil 1938 births 2016 deaths Cairo University alumni Egyptian male writers Egyptian scientists Place of birth missing 21st-century Egyptian writers Computational linguistics researchers Egyptian Air Force personnel EgyptAir Natural language processing researchers