UAE University and Jebel Hafeet

What an interesting day.  Spent the day at UAE University, one of the largest and most prestigious universities in the UAE meeting some of the professors and getting a tour of the labs there.  Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis  (who runs the lab) showed me around the Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory (IRML) where I saw some of their research projects including Ibn Sina (the world's first Arabic-speaking Humanoid Robot) and a Microsoft funded project called FaceBots (Facebook + Robots), which is just fun and could be expanded so much more (think twitter).  I also met Dr. Hesham El Sayed, who I need to thank for giving me an orientation on education in the UAE and also for introducing me to the Entrepreneurship center at the university.  Finally I met Dr. Leila Ismail who runs the High Performance Grid Computing Lab at the university and has been an Imagine Cup mentor for some successful teams from UAEU.

Some of the highlights were seeing Dr. Nikolaos’ monitor which is an idea I hope to copy soon,

seeing a camel in the back of a pick-up truck

and then getting to finally go to Jebel Hafeet.

  

I’ve been living in Dubai for 3 years and have visited Al Ain several times (the Zoo is a must), but had never gone up Jebel Hafeet.  Well, today was the day, what a great drive up,

seeing the sunset from the top and enjoying Iftar at the summit was fantastic.