The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) honored Dr. Salah AlNajem Founder and CEO of Information Age for I.T. Consultations and Professor of Computer Linguistics and Computer Processing of Natural Language at Kuwait University for his project “Social Intelligence” that earned the certificate of technical excellence WSIS Prize Champion as part of the World Summit.
The project was selected by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) judging panel this year among the top five projects in the category of "local e-content". These five projects earned the largest number of votes during the voting period for advanced projects of the total of more than two million votes delivered electronically and based on the evaluation of the jury of the prize for the project.
Dr. Salah AlNajem project has received the certificate of technical excellence among 1,062 projects in the field of information and communication technology, which was submitted to the Conference of the World Summit on the Information Society this year from different countries of the world and included ministries, government agencies, private companies, public benefit institutions and international universities.
The award aims at promoting and honoring the world-class projects that have successfully utilized ICTs as a tool to achieve sustainable development and to enable development in various areas such as e-government, e-commerce, e-content and e-learning.
Dr. AlNajem's achievement of this prestigious international certificate is a unique international recognition of excellence that emphasizes the ability of the Kuwaiti private sector to compete globally and reinforces its place in Kuwait and highlights its development in the field of ICT in international forums.
The Panel considered the justification for its selection for this project, which can be used through the application of the Web and the application of smart devices. The project is a system that provides the possibility of intelligent computer analysis and mood analysis of the content published on social media in the classical Arabic language and the Kuwaiti dialect by analyzing the big data that includes all what is said about certain words, phrases or topics on social media over a certain period of time. This system analyzes dialogue data on social media using artificial intelligence, computer text mining techniques, and Natural Language Processing. The system draws conclusions and indicators by identifying the mood of the public opinion in terms of the level of positive, negative and neutral, and by identifying the most prominent words and phrases traded on a particular subject after the exclusion of words and phrases are not important and identify important words and phrases which helps to know the most issues and events discussed during a certain period of time.
As a matter of fact, Dr. Salah AlNajem won the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2017 for his e-learning and virtual classroom project as the best project in the e-learning category.