Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African Heritage

An Arabic pattern on a crescent moon
Issue 29: Diversity

The long legacy of muslim computer science

Arabic scholars were some of the first to seriously work practically with the idea of algorithms spreading the ideas to the west. The foundation of robotics and cyber security also have strong foundations there from a millenia ago. This legacy lives on in the many of Middle Eastern and North African heritage (wherever they were born or work) excelling in computer science today.

Al-Jazari: the father of robotics

Science fiction films are full of humanoid robots acting as servants, workers, friends or colleagues. The first were created during the Islamic Golden Age, a thousand years ago… (read on)

The heart of an Arabic programming language

A colourful repeating geometric pattern

So far almost all computer languages have been written in English, but that doesn’t need to be the case. Computers don’t care. Computer scientist Ramsey Nasser developed the first programming language that uses Arabic script.  … (read on)

Al-Kindi: the dark history of algorithms

An Arabic pattern on a crescent moon

Zin Derfoufi, a Computer Science student at Queen Mary, delves into some of the dark secrets of algorithms past. Muslim scholar Al-Kindi played a key role  … (read on)

Designing an interactive prayer mat

Successful interactive systems design is often based on detecting a need that really good solutions do not yet exist for, then coming up with a realistic solution others haven’t thought of. The real key is then having the technical and design skill and perseverance to actually build it, as well as the perseverance to go through lots of rounds of prototyping to get it right. Even then it is still a long haul needing different people and business skills to end up with a successful product. Kamal Ali showed how its done with the development of My Salah Mat, an interactive prayer mat to help young children learn to pray… (read on)

AI Detecting the dead sea scrolls

The caves where the dead sea scrolls were found

Computer science and artificial intelligence have provided a new way to do science: it was in fact one of the earliest uses of the computer. They are now giving new ways for scholars to do research in other disciplines such as ancient history, too. Artificial Intelligence has been used in a novel way to help understand how the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, and it turns out scribes in ancient Judea worked in teams … (read on)

More to come (of course)

Find more diverse diversity on our diversity pages here.

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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