CMU-Q professor gets grant for research on cyber crimes

A research proposal that will delve into using natural language processing in Arabic in identifying cyber crimes was awarded a grant by the National Priorities Research Programme (NPRP) of Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF).

Anis Charfi, associate teaching professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q), received the award for the proposal “Arabic Author Profiling for Cyber Security,” along with fellow principal investigators Paolo Rosso of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, and Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou from CETIC - Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Multimédia et Traitement Numérique des Données de Sfax, Tunisia.

The proposal outlines how natural language processing will be used to analyse written Arabic text to ascertain an author’s characteristics like age, gender and nationality. This work has a number of practical applications, including detecting and preventing crimes like phishing, cyber-blackmailing and cyber-bullying in Arabic.

“Prof Charfi’s work has the potential for significant and widespread change in the area of Arabic-language cyber security. Carnegie Mellon Qatar has a long record of meaningful research that contributes to National Vision 2030, and this project will continue in that tradition,” said Ilker Baybars, dean and CEO of CMU-Q.  

NPRP is the flagship funding programme of QNRF that advances knowledge and education by supporting original, competitively selected research.