Hundred Saudi Female-Researchers in the Largest Centre for Software Technology in the Area
KACST and IBM sing MOU to Establish this Center

In the presence of Dr. Mohammed Ibrahim Al-Suwaiyel, KACST President and Mr. Sam Belmisano, IBM president, it has been agreed  to establish the largest national Software Development Center in the area that will staff more than hundred Saudi female-researchers in software who would provide high quality services and products that IBM would globally market. In the near future, the number of female-researchers will amount to 500 female-researchers.
The Memorandum of Understanding of this project has been signed by Prince Dr. Turki bin Saud bin Mohammad Al Saud, Vice President for Research Institutes and Mr. Takreem El-Tohamy, IBM vice representative in the area. According to this memorandum, the two parts will work together to carry out projects, in KACST headquarters, that target developing software industry in the kingdom and marketing them globally.
Dr. Turki said that the center will act as a catalyst for the growth of the software industry in the Kingdom and will deliver solutions to IBM and clients domestically and globally. He added that IBM would market the products of the center among its products all over the world, adding that KACST seeks building the capabilities of the center and its efficient staff.
The Prince Dr. unveiled a partnership between KACST and IBM in a project to enhance Machine Translation Engine into a powerful translation engine to translate from other languages into Arabic.  He elaborated that the project deals with natural language analysis and computational translation. Technologies used for machine translation, such as syntactic parsing and word sense disambiguation. These technologies can be used for other applications of natural language processing.
KACST shares IBM various joint research projects.  In February 2008, IBM and KACST signed a multi-year joint research agreement in which scientists from IBM and KACST are working side-by-side at the IBM Research labs in Yorktown Heights, NY and Almaden, CA and the KACST / IBM Nanotechnology Centre of Excellence in Riyadh.
The joint research projects between KACST and IBM focus on the critical areas of energy, water, and materials.  In the area of energy, KACST and IBM are jointly developing the technology of solar energy cells.
In the area of water, KACST and IBM are working on new nanomembranes for water filtration and desalination that show greatly improved performance over current technologies. Additionally, KACST and IBM are working to develop efficient organic catalysts that can be used to recycle plastics.