On March 11^th 2010, An-Najah University claimed first place in the Graduation Projects Competition of the Third Palestinian International Conference on Computer and Information Technology that was held at the Polytechnic University in Hebron, Palestine. Two students from the Department of Computer Engineering at An-Najah, Dima Shawahneh and Ayat Yaseen, scored first in the competition through their AOCR project.

Eight Palestinian universities participated with 22 graduation projects of which eight were nominated to be presented in front of the evaluation committee of the competition. An-Najah participated with three different projects. The first one was the AOCR project by Dima Shawahneh and Ayat Yaseen which was based on recognizing Arabic handwriting. Through this system, the user can enter his handwriting into the computer which saves it for later recognition. The second project was the CNC Plotter by Shadi Hanani and Mahmoud Yunes which included a device that receives a picture from the computer and paints it on paper with high accuracy, while the third was an Article Classification System by Hanin Mithqal, Suha Salameh and Rana Dwaikat which classifies English articles automatically.

The AOCR project was completed under the supervision of Dr. Anas Toamah. Dr. Toamah said that work on the project was full of challenges and took a long time and continuous effort. He added that computers recognize only English letters; therefore, creating a system that can recognize Arabic handwriting and letters was important. The system is able to recognize the handwriting of Arabic letters and numbers by the user with a percentage of 85%-100%.

The conference also included a number of scientific lectures in different fields such as Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Internet and networks, and image processing.