The University of Kurdistan Hewlêr (UKH) is proud to announce that Ameer Hameed Majeed, senior student in the Computer Science programme (Undergraduate level) has topped a research competition held in Abu Dhabi University recently.
Ameer and four of his classmates participated in the 11th Undergraduate Research and Innovation Competition (URIC) at Abu Dhabi University on May 23, 2024.
Ameer’s research, titled “Optical Character Recognition for Handwritten Syriac Text” was ranked top among 400 research papers from 25 disciplines, representing 64 universities across 14 countries. This is the first time a Kurdish student has achieved this distinction.
Ameer’s project aims to develop an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model so as to recognise handwritten text of Syriac, which is an endangered and low-resourced language, and output them in a digitized format using fine-tuning of the Tesseract-OCR engine on handwritten data. And it also seeks to bring forth a dataset that consists of handwritten Syriac sentences, of which were collected from volunteers that are capable of reading and writing in the language.
Ameer was warmly welcomed by UKH president Prof. Dr. Keith Sharp today and was awarded a shield of honor for his achievement. UKH vice president Prof. Dr. Dana Mawlood, the acting dean of the School of Science and Engineering Prof. Dr. Tarik A. Rashid as well as Dr. Hossein Hassani, Ameer’s research supervisor and Ahmed Qosaeri, the team mentor joined the meeting to congratulate the student group.
UKH extends its warmest congratulations to Ameer and his colleagues on their remarkable achievement.
