ArabWIC Palestine Team wins two awards at ArabWIC Conference
Dr. Mona Nabil Demaidi, Ms. Yamama Shak'ah from the Faculty of Engineering and IT and Ms. Ruba Awayes from the Faculty of Science represented An-Najah National University at the 6th Annual International Conference for Arab Women in Computing which was held in Rabat, Morocco during the period from March 6 to March 10, 2019.
Dr. Demaidi exhibited her research paper titled: "A method for Evaluating Domain Ontologies" which is to be published by ACM’s International Conference Proceedings. Ms. Shak'ah also gave a workshop on internet virtual reality as well as other lectures on different topics.
Ms. Awayes gave a lecture on digital fingerprint tackling its definition and workflow.
ArabWIC Palestine team, which included An-Najah representatives, along with Morocco and UAE teams won the Best Influential Chapter Award. Palestine team also won the Best Active and Cooperative Chapter Award.
During the conference the Arabwic Palestine chapter had the chance to meet inspiring women in the MENA region and worldwide. They also presented the activities they are working on to empower women in Palestine to Brenda Darden Wilkerson, the President and CEO of Anitab.org which has the vision to inspire, motivate, and move women in technology.
The goal of ArabWIC is to inspire, support and celebrate women in computing in the Arab world and create links with the global tech ecosystem. It inspires, retains, encourages collaboration, increases visibility and status of Arab women in computing, enabling them to achieve their career aspirations.
More than five hundred international and regional women and men from all technology sectors (academics, students, professionals and entrepreneurs) participated in the conference. The conference explored the state of the art of computing/technology, the latest innovations and trends, Research & Development, entrepreneurship and the role of women in tech start-ups and of women VC’s. Women’s enrollment in computer science courses, their involvement in industry and academia, gender gaps, positive trends as well as barriers in the field were examined.
ArabWIC was founded by Professor Sana Odeh in 2012 and has built a community of more than 6000 Arab technical women (academics, students, entrepreneurs, VC’s and industry professionals) from all over the world and has successfully created chapters in 19 countries.
ArabWIC members have organized several hackathons in many cities such as Beirut, Amman, Ramallah, Gaza, Dubai, Riyad, Qatar and Tunis along with major organizations such as AngelHack, LLWB, Wamda, ArabNet and Zoomaal. ArabWIC members have held mentoring, technical and research talks and workshops, career events, five annual conferences (three at NYUAD and one in Algeria, and one at AUB in Lebanon), and sessions to teach young girls to code and many other important events in more than 10 Arab countries.
