Tarek Sheikh AL-Shbab

The IFRC collects data from 191 National Societies through its Federation-wide Databank and Reporting System (FDRS). Checking that data by hand does not scale, so we use AI and open-source tools to validate it. I presented this session at the IFRC Global Innovation Summit 2023: what we automate ...

Spike is an online platform that makes AI usable for businesses, governments and other organisations. Most organisations need AI but cannot build and maintain it in-house. Spike uses their own data to support the people already doing the work, not to replace them. It provides three things: ...

A registration system for cash assistance at the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, built in two parts. The field app. A customised version of ODK Collect that reads a person’s ID by scanning the barcode with the volunteer’s phone camera. It works offline and syncs when a connection is available, which m...

The AUB AI for Accessibility Hackathon focused on one thing: using AI to build assistive technology for people with disabilities. Our team worked on speech-to-text for non-standard speech, with Arabic support. Speech recognition tools do badly with speech they were not trained on, which is exact...

I automated the collection, processing, analysis, visualisation and sharing of data from more than 100 warehouses, covering over a million distributed items for more than 3.5 million people in Syria. The pipeline was built with Dataiku and Python. Some of the code is public: Dataiku auto warehou...

What is WRO? The World Robot Olympiad is a global robotics competition for young people, built around Lego Mindstorms from LEGO Education. It started in Singapore in 2004 and now draws more than 26,000 teams from over 65 countries. The Open Category is project-based. Teams build their own robot...

Arduino Day is marked in more than 100 countries every 16 March. Schools, universities, organisations and hobbyists all take part, showing Arduino boards and what people build with them, and talking about open source and why it matters for a community. We held it at the ASPU (Al-Sham Private Uni...

On 18 February 2014, Damascus held its first Startup Weekend. It ran for 54 hours over three days, with a bootcamp for participants beforehand and international entrepreneurs joining online. The winner got access to venture funding and publicity. For a city in the middle of a war, it was the f...

This report sets out what the robotics community in Syria has done and what it needs. It also looks at events, competitions and activities in other countries, and asks which of them could work here. The aim is to give governments, international NGOs, donors and educational institutions something...

What is the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp? One intense week of learning and practising entrepreneurship, taught by MIT faculty, MIT coaches and guest speakers, and worked out in project teams. Every participant gets a turn as CEO, leading their team for a day. In that week you go through ...

The World Robot Olympiad is a global robotics competition for young people, built around Lego Mindstorms from LEGO Education. It started in Singapore in 2004 and now draws more than 26,000 teams from over 65 countries. I co-organized the national competition for Syria: more than 75 teams, 25 j...

TOEBI Makers — a robot that makes compost, with a mobile app In 2016 my team and I represented Syria at the World Robot Olympiad in India, in the Open Category. We were a team of three. What is WRO? The World Robot Olympiad is a global robotics competition for young people, built around Lego...

We ran a one-week ICT Incubator Bootcamp on entrepreneurship and startups in Syria. It gives participants what they need to start building a company. The first bootcamp ran in Damascus in October 2015, where we accepted 21 ideas. We ran it again at ICTI in Homs in November 2015 for 14 ideas, and...

Bit Code is an online platform for learning to build web and mobile applications. The courses are interactive, in Arabic, and free. We reached 3,500 registered users in the first four months after launch. Bit Code was backed by Oasis500 in Jordan, and won first place in the Jusoor entrepreneur...

The Engineering Design Challenge (EDC) is a university-level engineering competition for the region. The AUB Robotics Club ran it for the first time at the American University of Beirut in 2015. The theme of EDC 2.0 was “Drive Smarter”. The idea behind it is simple. Engineering students in the r...