Posted by Hussein Salama, director of Advanced Technology Labs Cairo

The latest in a series of posts from the directors of Microsoft Research’s labs worldwide, this one from Hussein Salama from Advanced Technology Labs Cairo.

This has been an incredible year for our lab in Cairo. The year started with a popular revolution that rocked all corners of the Egyptian society. The resulting hope for a better future translated into unusually high excitement and motivation among all Advanced Technology Labs Cairo team members.

We decided to reach out to Egyptian and Arab Internet users directly and released a labs-style portal called Microsoft Afkar that offers useful Arabic-language tools.

Furthermore, the revolution inspired us to take our research collaborations to the next level by creating a consortium of three leading Egyptian universities to research and develop community-based translation services. These services could be content-creation enablers for underserved languages in general, not just Arabic.

In parallel, we continued to execute, focusing on our ongoing explorations in our established domains, languages, and content services, with our primary objectives being technology risk reduction and facilitating the transfer of Microsoft Research technologies to Microsoft product teams.

This has been a great year for Advanced Technology Labs Cairo, and we intend to make 2012 even more successful.