2017 June Beacon

June 2017 Ramadan, 1438 Volume 8, Issue No. 6 ‫جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‬

‫ المملكة العربية السعودية‬،‫ثول‬

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Thuwal, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

www.kaust.edu.sa

‫ برنامج اإلثراء‬: "‫"الرواد‬ 2017 ‫في الربيع‬

'Pioneers:' Enrichment in the Spring 2017 Pages 10 - 19

Building SANDS at KAUST Page 6

Doing what was once impossible Page 10 A taxonomy of great science Page 12 Ancient disruptors of the Islamic Golden Age Page 14 Conquering your doorstep mile Page 16 How to be a successful scientist-entrepreneur Page 18

From waste to resource: the future of wastewater treatment Page 20 Visualizing the future of computing Page 24 KAUST draws a crowd Page 28 KAUST and Thermo Fisher Scientific open Center of Excellence Page 30

In brief

The University Library offers a variety of trainings and classes designed to help researchers and students get the most from the Library’s wide array of resources and to improve their research skills. Sessions are available to all members of the KAUST community. To reserve your seat, visit libguides.kaust.edu.sa/libtraining.

The University's Research Publications Services (RPS) supports the KAUST academic community in the presentation and publication of research in peer-reviewed journals by providing editing, scientific illustration and scientific photography services. The office offers four services: comprehensive text editing and proofreading, scientific illustration, research photography and plagiarism checking using the web-based iThenticate software program. For more information, visit http://rps.kaust.edu.sa/.

On May 3, the 2017 Employee Awards recognized the 330 employees who reached the five-year service milestone with KAUST. Also recognized were the University individuals nominated for an Award for Excellence.

On the evening of May 4, the Eighth Annual Talent Show showcased the many talents of the KAUST community. Sixteen finalists from the community took part in nine different acts of song, comedy and other surprises, and audience members voted for a first, second and third place People's Choice Award, with first place winning two economy class return tickets to Frankfurt.

The Beacon Volume 8, Issue No. 6 PUBLISHED BY MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Thuwal, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The Beacon Staff Managing Editor: Nicholas Demille Arabic Editor: Salah Sindi English Editor: Caitlin Clark Designer: Mahjubeh R. Mashhadi Writers: David Murphy, Meres J. Weche Translator: Adel Alrefaie Photographers: Ginger Lisanti, Lilit Hovhannisyan The Beacon is published monthly. © 2017 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

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THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

The Sci-Café Communicating Science Visually: Using human perception to understand data took place on May 1 in the Visualization Core Lab showcase. The event examined how we communicate science through different visual means and included speakers Daniel Acevedo-Feliz, Visualization Core Lab director; Xavier Pita, scientific illustrator; and Tamara Jones, visual artist. It was moderated by John Tannaci, director of Research Operations.

The holy month of Ramadan is expected to take place from May 27 to June 24 this year.

During Ramadan, both the Community Hub and the library room in Harbor Square will remain open until 2:00 a.m. for relaxing and enjoying coffee. Each Thursday and Friday during Ramadan, there will be a range of activities for the whole family, including early evening at the Harbor Sports Club and late evening at Discovery Square, Harbor Walk and the community library. There is something for everyone, whether enjoying Iftar with friends at the Harbor Walk restaurants, watching late-night movies or taking part in activities for the children in the community library. For more information, contact GetEngaged@KAUST.edu.sa.

Ph.D. Electrical Engineering candidate Itsikiantsoa “Tsiky” Randrianantenaina, accompanied by KAUST Professor David Keyes on piano, gave a vocal recital on the evening of May 10. The recital's program spanned over three centuries of musical classics in song from the baroque of the early 18th century to the pop of the early 21st century from the grand halls of Europe to the Broadway stages of America.

The TAQADAM Startup Showcase 2017 took place on campus on May 11, during which audience members heard stories from 10 passionate startup founders participating in the TAQADAM University Accelerator Program. TAQADAM was developed and is run by the KAUST Entrepreneurship Center in collaboration with SABB. The startups presented their business ideas to a panel of high-profile judges, with a winner selected to receive additional funding of up to $30,000.

The end-of-semester Musical Celebrations concert took place on the evening of May 15, with musicians from the KAUST community performing pieces by Beethoven, Schubert, Mavis Pan and Leroy Jones in solo selections and small ensembles. For more information about future concerts and musical events, visit artsoffice.kaust.edu.sa.

On May 18, the global 2017 Fascination of Plants day, the University held a SciCafé: Growing Food for the Future for the community to learn about how plant technologies can help to feed the world.

Speakers included Heribert Hirt, professor of plant science; Matt McCabe, associate professor of environmental science and engineering; and Magdy Mahfouz, assistant professor of plant science. Also on May 18, the Desert Agriculture Initiative scientists, staff and students took KAUST community members on guided tours of the Desert Agriculture Initiative lab facilities. Photo: Centerpivot irrigation in the Tabuk region, Saudi Arabia; photo by Lukas Synek.

The KAUST Research Conference: Predictive Complex Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) took place from May 22 to 24. The conference focused on cutting-edge research in the field of algorithmic development for CFD and multi-scale complex flow simulations and gathered top scientists from academia and industry in the multidisciplinary field of CFD to present and discuss their work. The conference's poster session provided the opportunity for individuals to present their research and offered an excellent venue for extended informal discussion with conference attendees.

The KAUST Integrated Ocean Processes (IOP) lab, in collaboration with the University's Red Sea Research Center (RSRC) and Information Technology (IT), rolled out the Research Geographic Information System (GIS) on May 23. GIS discovers patterns and relationships in spatial data, helping to visualize, analyze and share data across the KAUST research community. During the event, KAUST Professor of Marine Science Burton Jones discussed GIS experiences of the IOP lab and how information technology helps its members to enhance their GIS potential.

The University congratulated Spring 2017 graduates at a luncheon on May 25 as they became the newest class of KAUST alumni.

James Calvin, vice president for academic affairs, applauded graduates on their academic achievements, persistence and passion, noting, “You are the generation charged with finding solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the world.” Lea Sublett, manager of alumni affairs, told the alumni, “No matter where you go or what you do, KAUST will always be a part of who you are.”

The Health, Safety & Environment Department (HSE) team held a guided bird walk on the morning of May 26 at the KAUST South Beach. The KAUST campus is a haven for birds, with more than 240 species recorded on campus, and about 25 species are usually seen on each walk. For information about upcoming walks, visit https://hse.kaust.edu. sa/AwarnessEngagementAndTraining/ Pages/Environmental-Calendar.aspx. Photo

by Marios Mantzourogiannis.

www.kaust.edu.sa

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Accolades Three KAUST Ph.D. students to attend Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

1. KAUST Ph.D. students (from

left to right) Dalal Alezi, Yevhen Fatieievand Samah Mohamed will travel to Lindau, Germany, for the annual Nobel Lindau meeting. Photo by Ginger Lisanti.

2. Ahmed Sultan Salem

(center), a KAUST visiting associate professor of electrical engineering, won the 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award. He is pictured with KAUST President Jean-Lou Chameau (left) and James Calvin (right), KAUST vice president for Academic Affairs, as he receives his award.

Dalal Alezi, Samah Mohamed and Yevhen Fatieiev, three KAUST Ph.D. students, have been chosen to attend the 67th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which will be held from June 25 to 30 in Lindau, Germany.

"The idea itself is quite overwhelming. We'll have the chance to sit in the same room and hear from the laureates about how they accomplished the work that made them famous," said Mohamed.

The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings have taken place annually since 1951, bringing outstanding young scientists together to meet a collection of Nobel laureates and esteemed academics for a week of activities. This year, over 400 young scientists under the age of 35 who perform research in the field of chemistry are slated to attend.

Yevhen Fatieiev is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the KAUST Smart Hybrid Materials lab under the supervision of Associate Professor Niveen Khashab. Fatieiev's research focuses on three main areas: magnetic nanoparticles for controlled release and delivery; nanoparticle surface modification for bioimaging in living cells; and biodegradable silica nanoparticles.

All three of the students have been chosen from the University's Physical Science and Engineering Division, as this year's meeting is dedicated to the field of chemistry.

"I didn't expect this invitation. I was appointed by my advisor and it was a complete surprise—a great surprise," said Fatieiev.

Dalal Alezi is a Saudi Ph.D. student supervised by Mohamed Eddaoudi, distinguished professor of chemical science and director of the KAUST Advanced Membranes and Porous Materials Research Center. Alezi's research activities focus on the design and synthesis of novel metal-organic materials and the exploration of their properties in a wide range of applications, such as gas separation and storage, catalysis and drug delivery.

"Three Nobel laureates I know of in supramolecular chemistry will be there, and this is something we are doing in our lab, so that's quite exciting," Fatieiev added.

"It's a great honor to be nominated to go and spend time with all these Nobel laureates—to go, to exchange ideas, to spend time and to become part of the network," said Alezi.

Samah Mohamed is a third-year Ph.D. student in the University's Clean Combustion Research Center.

Her research centers around the development of chemical kinetic models of different fuels to accurately predict combustion properties and behavior. Under the supervision of Associate Professor Mani Sarathy, Mohamed uses different software and quantum chemistry calculations to estimate thermodynamic data and reaction rate rules.

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Ahmed Sultan Salem wins 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award Ahmed Sultan Salem, a visiting associate professor of electrical engineering at KAUST since 2011, won the 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award for his exceptional dedication to developing scientific talent. He was one of six KAUST professors nominated for the award by the University's divisions.

Salem teaches a broad spectrum of electrical engineering and applied mathematics courses ranging from basic 100-level preparatory courses to advanced 300-level Ph.D. courses. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2007, and his current research interests lie in energy harvesting, cognitive radio technology, dynamic spectrum access, cooperative communications, distributed and sequential detection, physical layer-based secrecy and OFDM for optical communications.

“I believe that teaching is not a one-way process," Salem said. "Trying to explain and share knowledge improves one’s own understanding of the subject. From my teaching experience, I realized that a teacher learns significantly from his or her students’ inquiries and insights.

This has a double impact. First, it helps advance the teaching process itself, making it a positive feedback endeavor in a state of continual improvement. Second, it helps in one’s research, the other crucial component of an academic career. I view the opportunity to teach and to engage with students as the most rewarding part of my career and professional life.”

“Professor Salem’s passion and dedication to his graduate students extends beyond the classroom and into their daily lives. This recognition attests to his exceptional commitment to teaching and mentorship," noted James Calvin, KAUST vice president for Academic Affairs.

The University's exciting 2017 Enrichment in the Spring program took place on campus from April 14 to 19. Check out the Twitter accounts of some of the program's speakers to follow their adventures around the world.

South African artist Mbongeni Buthelezi (@mbongenibu) transforms recycled plastic into works of art. He began painting with plastics in 1991 when he was a young student at the African Institute of Art in Soweto. His art "is not only about the beauty of the images...but it's also a creative way to reuse waste from going into the environment," he says.

Innovative surgeon Laurent Lantieri (@LaurentLantieri) performed the first full-face transplantation, with his team responsible for seven of the 28 full-face transplantatations done to date worldwide. In 2012, he received the French Légion d'honneur in recognition of his work.

British adventurer, author and blogger Alastair Humphreys (@Al_Humphreys) chronicles his journeys around the globe, and spent over four years cycling around the world, a journey covering 46,000 miles through 60 countries and five continents. He also rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, ran six marathons through the Sahara desert, walked across southern India, participated in an expedition in the Arctic and trekked 1,000 miles across the Empty Quarter desert.

Dartmouth Professor of Engineering Eric R. Fossum (@EricRFossum), a semiconductor device physicist and engineer, invented the CMOS image sensor used in billions of cameras worldwide.

He was inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011 and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Experimental and improvisational jazz and alternative rock-style singer Abdulrahman Mohammed (@moooonlight1979) is passionate about making music through unique methods that include mixing in light Turkish music styles.

His career began during a televised singing competition in 1999, and he now has over 450,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel with over 100,000,000 views from 2008 to 2016.

/KaustOfficial

kaustofficial

@KAUST_News

@KAUST_NewsAR

/kaustedu

/company/kaust

kaustofficial

KAUST Official

www.kaust.edu.sa

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Building SANDS at KAUST

By David Murphy We live in a connected world where networked systems play an increasingly important role. These systems, which are the foundational pillars of our modern digital lives, are the result of some remarkable technological advancements and progress in computer science over the past three decades.

Yet despite all the advances in computer science and research in computer-based systems, we still have an immature understanding of how we should design and operate such systems based on first principles that make systems dependable, energy-efficient, easy to manage and future-proof. Conversely, systems are increasing in both size and complexity and are bound to scaling-up to accommodate ever-larger numbers of components and users. We are still far from mastering a science for building systems, and we are now experiencing radical technological trends and paradigm shifts that require us to revisit our previous decisions and designs.

A new alternative or solution to Moore's Law—which has sustained decades of scaling—is needed. A growing body of data needs to be analyzed and new services are required to connect more people and devices.

Improving how we compute Marco Canini is a computer scientist and an assistant professor in the KAUST Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division, and his research goal is to solve some of the aforementioned problems and attempt to decode these interconnected networked systems.

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THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

Canini’s work is focused on improving networkedsystem design, implementation and operation along vital properties like reliability, performance, security and energy efficiency. A particular thrust of his research centers around the principled construction and operation of large-scale networked computer systems, and in particular the development of Software-Defined Advanced Networked and Distributed Systems (SANDS).

“I work on distributed systems and networking and specifically at the intersection of these two subcommunities—it’s something I like to call networked systems,” Canini said.

“Not everyone is conscious of how modern lives in the digital era operate because we are all so used to convenient online services—services like search, file sharing and other interactive applications that are interconnected and that regulate many aspects of our lives. These services are possible due to technological developments in terms of what I define as systems infrastructures: compute, storage and networking. People may not really perceive how critical and how important this systems infrastructure is, but it really is the pillars of what supports all of our digital lives,” he said.

The shortest path to becoming a computer scientist Outside of his academic career, Canini has worked for Google, Intel and Deutsche Telekom. This exposure to industry and academic centers of excellence served to fuel Canini’s passion for becoming the best possible computer scientist.

“Many environments have shaped my own taste for research and problems. I have been very fortunate in my path because I had the privilege of being exposed both to academia, centers of excellence and industry. Through this exposure, I could always see combining the idea of technology into practical products,” Canini said.

“The exposure to these companies and institutions has really helped with the context and the excellent people I met. Thankfully, because of the successes I have had, I have had exposure to many other subfields of computer science, such as security, formal methods, machine learning, optimization theory, software engineering and programming languages that really happened because of this path that I took,” he added.

Building systems worthy of society's trust To develop something that has not only a theoretical insight but also has an impact in some form and that is highly rewarding and satisfactory is a major drive for Canini in his research goals and career. Taking this drive as far as it can go is also challenging, as it requires many factors to coalesce at the same time.

“I have had this desire to expand and evolve my research with computer systems, because not only are they highly complex systems, but they are also exceedingly important. If you look at what the internet has achieved in just over 20 years—it’s so remarkable. The internet is probably one of the most complex—if not the most complex system—that humanity has created. It is really a

remarkable success story. It shows just how tremendous an impact and one object can create, and that for me is very interesting to study,” he said.

“We must strive to ensure our research is aligned with what the world needs and whether you have the right solution at the right time. I am excited for the ultimate goal of my work, which is to distill fundamental principles towards enriching our knowledge on how to build scalable, dependable and future-proof systems worthy of society's trust,” Canini noted.

Remarkable progress in computer science Even though we have had remarkable progress in computer science and in systems in particular, we still don’t have a constructive theory of how you can design and build a system that is going to work the way that it is meant to—a system that will achieve whatever you set out to achieve.

“In a way, computer science is the opposite of civil engineering—you set out to design a bridge, you know what it is going to do and whether it is going to stand and you have stability. In computer science, we don’t have this stability, and there is evidence that we are far away from having any constructive theory,” Canini said.

“The vision for the work we are doing at KAUST is to make it easy to produce and manage key networked systems that society trusts and that can achieve specific objectives. Our team strives for impact. In some cases,

www.kaust.edu.sa

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1 we are concerned with high performance and scalability, but it’s not just about making things fast; they must also be dependable and future proof. We also want to ensure predictability of the performance. We want to create higher reliability and lower the complexity of managing large-scale systems, because the bigger the system, the harder it is to control it. When you reduce the complexity or remove an obstruction, this is a very powerful thing— we strive to learn the general principles and lessons of what really works in practice,” he noted.

Complexity—the hardest challenge

“It is also critical to having consistently low latency in practice and not just the occasional average case, but the latency for the say 99 percent of the cases to be low.

It is very important from an economic perspective and a usability perspective,” he noted.

The typical systems research deals with many challenges, but the number one challenge is complexity.

Most of Canini’s time is devoted to understanding and unraveling the many complexities and nuances that computer systems entail.

“Take for example Amazon: they showed that if they were to increase the latency of how they serve the traffic by 100 milliseconds, it would cost them 1 percent in sales. It’s very important for companies and businesses to have low latency,” he added.

“Complexity is the hardest challenge that we face because these computer systems are very complex and they are very hard to scale to extremely large numbers of components and users. We really don’t understand all the different interconnections, so it is similar in a sense to a biological system, because we can get a grasp of the individual components but don’t quite know how it all works once pieced together,” Canini acknowledged.

Addressing the growing computing and data demand

The ‘three Ds’ of SDN For the past several years, Canini’s research has been towards developing foundations towards softwaredefined networking (SDN). This is achieved through advancements in what he calls the “three Ds” of SDN, which are development, debugging and deployment.

In view of the fact that networks have become programmable systems, one has to figure out the programming abstractions that are the correct ones so that one can use these programming abstractions to efficiently develop important and useful applications in the network and with minimal effort.

“Recently there has been a new shift of paradigms for networking, which is something we call SDN. With SDN, we are allowed to design networks that are tailored to application needs. The way that we do this is by making the network programmable, meaning that we can program the network, we can adapt it to be more flexible and we can evolve it with new and changing application requirements. In a sense, it means we can now make networks that are more reliable, flexible and secure,” Canini explained.

“There is a bit more to our research, however,” he continued. “It is just not only SDN—we also work intensely on data centers and cloud computing problems, where our goal is towards enabling

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predictable performance when running in this kind of environment, because many applications in the data centers are actually distributed applications and are made from a collection of resources and face many sources of performance fluctuations. They demand predictable performance.”

THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

Any approach that Canini and his colleagues might adhere to is rendered more difficult by two ongoing trends in computer science. The first trend is that the demand for computing has been exploding over the past few years, and this growing demand has accelerated the need to build massive data centers globally to cope with it.

Coupled with this demand is the need to support new applications.

“These new applications are getting more interactive, and they are getting more data that they need to process, so there's more stringent latency requirements to be able to support them. New applications come with different requirements, and the network itself is something that up to this point was not designed with 'evolvability' in mind. It was not designed to be easily extendable,” Canini said.

“This is a hard trend to cope with, because also the underlying efficiency of the hardware is in a sense diminishing, especially with respect to how our ability to make things run faster on a single CPU thread. As a result of the ineffective hardware, we need to involve multiple cores and higher parallelisms—all things that make the process harder for people,” he added.

"The second trend is data, and namely the amount of data we generate and consume. This volume of consumption is only getting bigger, and the need to process this data is ever-growing. It has been said that we have already entered the so-called 'zetabyte era.' There are many reasons why we have entered this era, including the explosion of mobile internet and social media: broadband—which has increased in speeds and the ability to carry mobile devices that generate thousands

1. Marco Canini is a computer scientist and an

assistant professor in the KAUST Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division. Photo by Meres J. Weche.

2. Assistant Professor Marco Canini works on distributed systems and networking and specifically at the intersection of these two sub-communities. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

2 of pictures and videos; and the new generation of video and streaming and media distributions. This level of data consumption is expected to continue, and also the internet of things (IoT) is developing, which will connect literally billions of sensors and devices."

the network-bandwidth or compute or the storage, and these attacks are getting increasingly ever more powerful, due in part due to insecure devices deployed as part of the IoT that attackers can harness to create many hundreds of gigabits/s of attack traffic.

“People are really struggling with all this data, and it’s not good to collect data for the sake of it. What I derived from these observations is that the systems and decisions we have today were made in the last decade.

The older systems can hardly cope with today’s scale and volume and velocity, let alone be tasked with this volume in the future. At KAUST, our team wants to design and reach new techniques. We want to create solutions that can improve performance by 10 times or 100 times in the way we solve particularly tough problems,” he said.

“The way that software-defined networking can help in better securing networks is that it gives the programmability of the network. We have these points of interconnection on the internet called internet eXchange Points (IXPs) that can deploy software-defined networks.

In this example, suppose that we have a victim of some attack or some traffic and we want to prevent this attacktraffic to reach the victim. In a traditional network, as a victim I could basically do this by saying I don’t want to be reachable by the autonomous system from where the attack traffic enters my network. However, what I would do is that I would effectively cut it out. There would be some legitimate traffic and some attack traffic, and I would stop everything—which is not what I want,” Canini stated.

Dealing with network errors When dealing with such complicated systems and networks, errors are sure to occur that can create major outages, errors in communication, execution and processes, etc. Due to the increased interconnectivity in today’s modern society, people tend to notice when these network faults happen. When these faults happen, they can create massive knock-on effects for companies, affecting the users who with and consume their services.

Canini drew attention to some of the more celebrated networking faults in the recent past.

“There have been major outages episodes in the past; for example, with Amazon Web Services (which is the most popular cloud provider) when it incorrectly executed a network change. During a planned network capacity upgrade, there was a major outage that broke down a lot of services within Amazon. I believe the outage could have been traced back to just one individual—to a singular human error in the command chain,” Canini said.

“Despite everything, people can still manually cause errors or misconfigurations, and that again is another source of big problems. People can have a hard time trying to really figure out how these complex systems can all interact. A few years back, network connectivity issues also disrupted GitHub (a very popular service among developers) and United Airlines, entirely disrupting their airport processing and ticket reservation systems. Most recently, Delta Airlines had to ground all of their flights due to some computer system problem for several hours,” he added.

New solutions for traditional problems However advanced they may be, SDNs can also suffer from traditional problems, such as distributed denialof-service attacks (DDoS). DDoS are attacks where the attacker aims to exhaust resources—whether these are

“With the software-defined networking—because I can program the network rules myself—I could actually have the victim detect specifically which traffic is the attack one and inform a software-defined IXP to stop and block specifically only that traffic, thus preventing that attack to go and propagate further.”

In terms of further real-world applications for his research, Canini highlighted a recent project he is working on at KAUST. “One particular project I can highlight is one that we have done for cloud data stores. This project started before KAUST, but we are continuing it here. The project is about reducing the latency in cloud data stores. Not every server is as fast as the other one and this changes overtime, but we exploit the fact that there is server redundancy and multiple copies of each data element. To address this, we built an adaptive replica selection technique and implemented it in a system called Apache Cassandra, an open source storage system used by many companies.

We demonstrated that we can reduce the latency at the tail of the latency distribution, that is, the 99.9 percentile by a factor of three, which is a significant factor,” Canini said.

“This was an important study and we collaborated with two companies—Spotify and Soundcloud—where a prototype of this load balancing technology was actually tested on their test beds. Load balancing refers to choosing the server so that you are doing a good job to balance the load. Spotify today has something they call the expected latency selector, which has been influenced by the approach that we followed. This shows in a sense the impact that we have had and can have with this technology,” he noted.

www.kaust.edu.sa

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Doing what was once impossible

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By Nicholas Demille Reconstructive microsurgey is the transplant of body parts with arteries and veins to damaged areas of the body. Examples include transplanting sections of skin from the tummy to the neck and face or replacing a damaged thumb with a toe. Early practitioners of the medical sciences attempted many of these procedures and documented their work well before 1900. Due to the widespread need for such procedures after World War I, surgeons rapidly developed the protocols, tools and medications to make microsurgeries more routinely successful.

Dr. Laurent A. Lantieri, a modern physician and pioneer who has helped innovate the field of microsurgery, visited KAUST recently as part of the 2017 Enrichment in the Spring program.

Lantieri’s high-profile surgical work is focused on improving the quality of life for patients who have experienced disabling injuries or illness in vital areas such as the face and hands. His high-profile surgical cases include a double hand transplant as well as the world’s first full-face transplant.

A brief history of transplant surgeries Lantieri delivered a keynote address as part of his time at KAUST, outlining a brief history of reconstructive microsurgical procedures. He highlighted a historic article about one such procedure known as flap surgery, which detailed the use of a flap from the forehead to replace a damaged nose.

According to Lantieri, World War I and II were times of rapid innovation in the field of reconstructive surgery given the massive numbers of injuries sustained in the conflicts. World War I, for example, was a time when surgeons experimented with the growth of tubes of skin to reconstruct features of the face.

World War II saw the development of skin grafting.

In particular, Lantieri cited Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar for his work on the immune response to skin grafts, as well as the work of pioneering surgeons such as Joseph Murray, who performed the first successful kidney transplant. According to Lantieri, Murray's critical insights about immunology paved the way for many of the transplant procedures we view as routine today.

Vascular surgery is also a key component of successful transplant surgery, according to Lantieri. Though controversial, Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel's work led to the success of surgeons like Harry Buncke, who pioneered the suturing of small vessels and ultimately the repair of major injuries.

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THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

The hands and face Lantieri talked through not only the transplantation of soft tissue but also of bone. He performs allotransplantation, which is the movement of tissue and bone from donors to recipients. This has been made possible by the many historic advances in vascular surgery and immunology he spoke about earlier in his talk.

"For centuries, pioneers were attempting transplants and failing because they lacked the proper techniques and medications," Lantieri said. "For example, the first hand transplant happened in 1963, but it was largely unsuccessful due to the lack of drugs needed to properly blunt the immune system's natural response to non-native tissue. It was only after the development of the right cocktail of drugs that wide-scale allotransplant surgeries became possible."

Apart from the historical and technical aspects of transplant surgery, Lantieri also spoke at length about the professional ethics of transplant surgery in both his KAUST Live interview and during his keynote address.

“We cannot harvest a face or arms without consideration for the deceased and that person's family," Lantieri said.

"When we take these items from a donor, we replace them with prosthetic items and a mask to make sure that the body of the deceased is intact. Ethically, we have to treat all patients—donors and recipients—with the same level of respect.”

The future of surgery might not be 'surgery' Lantieri dedicated part of his talk to the growth of new tissues as an alternative to transplant and allotransplant (transplant from a donor) procedures.

“Maybe the future is with tissue engineering, in which we will grow animal and human tissues in plant cell scaffolds,” Lantieri opined. "Pioneers such as Harald C. Ott have removed small cells from a donor and have grown new organs, but creating new full-size organs is still not possible. Ultimately I think the future is bioengineering, and I think we will see this come to fruition within the next 10 years or so."

Scan here to view Dr. Laurent Lantieri's KAUST Live interview, part of the 2017 Enrichment in the Spring program.

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‫‪1. Pioneering plastic surgeon Dr. Laurent‬‬ ‫‪Lantieri delivers a keynote address on April 17‬‬ ‫‪as part of the University's 2017 Enrichment in‬‬ ‫‪the Spring program.‬‬ ‫‪2. Dr. Laurent Lantieri (right) stands with‬‬ ‫‪Marie-Laure Boulot, KAUST manager of‬‬ ‫‪Enrichment Programs, after his keynote‬‬ ‫‪Enrichment in the Spring presentation.‬‬ ‫‪Photos by Lilit Hovhannisyan.‬‬

‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫يوما ما‬ ‫مستحيال‬ ‫تحقيق ما كان‬ ‫نيقوالس ديميل‬

‫يمكن تعريف الجراحة المجهرية االستنباتية بأنها زراعة أجزاء من الجسم مع‬ ‫الشرايين واألوردة في مناطق متضررة منه‪ .‬ومن أمثلة ذلك أخذ مقاطع من الجلد‬ ‫من منطقة البطن وزرعها في الرقبة والوجه‪ ،‬أو استبدال إبهام متضرر بأحد أصابع‬ ‫القدم‪ .‬لقد حاول الممارسون األوائل للعلوم الطبية إجراء الكثير من العمليات‬ ‫طور الجراحون‬ ‫المشابهة‪ ،‬ووثقوا عملهم قبل عام ‪ 1900‬بكثير‪ .‬وسرعان ما ّ‬ ‫البروتوكوالت واألدوات واألدوية الالزمة إلنجاح عمليات الجراحة المجهرية بصورة‬ ‫اعتيادية أكثر‪ ،‬وذلك بسبب الحاجة واسعة النطاق لمثل هذه اإلجراءات بعد الحرب‬ ‫العالمية األولى‪.‬‬ ‫لقد زار الدكتور لوران النتيري‪ ،‬وهو من األطباء والرواد المعاصرين الذين أسهموا‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مؤخرا‬ ‫في ابتكار ميدان الجراحة المجهرية‪ ،‬جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‬ ‫في إطار برنامج اإلثراء في الربيع‪ .‬وأجريت معه مقابلة مباشرة على الهواء ُب ّثت‬ ‫عبر صفحة الجامعة على موقع "فيسبوك" في إطار سلسلة البث المباشر في‬ ‫جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‪.‬‬ ‫[‪]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUgLGSB8qWE‬‬ ‫وتركز العمليات الجراحية المتطورة التي يجريها النتيري على تحسين حياة المرضى‬ ‫الذين تعرضوا إلى إصابات ينجم عنها إعاقات أو أمراض في مناطق حيوية كالوجه‬ ‫واليدين‪ .‬ومن العمليات الجراحية المتطورة التي أجراها عملية زرع يدوية ثنائية‪،‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫فضال عن أول عملية زراعة وجه كامل في العالم‪.‬‬

‫تاريخ موجز عن جراحات الزرع‬ ‫ألقى النتيري كلمة رئيسية أثناء وجوده في جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم‬ ‫والتقنية‪ ،‬استعرض فيها بإيجاز تاريخ الجراحة المجهرية االستنباتية‪ .‬وعرض مقالة‬ ‫تاريخية تتحدث عن أحد أنواع هذه اإلجراءات الذي يعرف بالجراحة السديلية‪ ،‬وشرح‬ ‫فيها بالتفصيل كيفية استخدام سديلة من الجبهة الستبدال أنف متضرر‪.‬‬ ‫ويقول النتيري إن الحروب الكبيرة‪ ،‬وما خلفته من أعداد ضخمة من اإلصابات‪،‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫جرب‬ ‫وقتا‬ ‫كانت‬ ‫مناسبا لالبتكار السريع في مجال الجراحة االستنباتية‪ .‬فقد ّ‬ ‫الجراحون‪ ،‬على سبيل المثال‪ ،‬زرع أنابيب من الجلد لترميم مالمح الوجه أثناء الحرب‬ ‫العالمية األولى‪.‬‬ ‫وشهدت الحرب العالمية الثانية تطور تطعيم الجلد‪ .‬وعلى وجه التحديد‪ ،‬ضرب‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مثال عن بيرت ميداوار‪ ،‬الحائز على جائزة نوبل على عمله في االستجابة‬ ‫النتيري‬ ‫المناعية لطعوم الجلد‪ ،‬باإلضافة إلى أعمال جراحين رواد مثل جوزيف موراي‪،‬‬ ‫الذي أجرى أول عملية ناجحة لزرع كلية‪ .‬ورأى النتيري أن رؤى موراي الهامة عن‬ ‫عبدت الطريق أمام العديد من إجراءات الزرع التي أصبحت عملية‬ ‫علم المناعة قد ّ‬ ‫روتينية في الوقت الحالي‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا من جراحة الزرع الناجحة‪.‬‬ ‫رئيسيا‬ ‫مكونا‬ ‫وقال النتيري إن جراحة األوعية تعتبر‬ ‫ورغم أنه إشكالي‪ ،‬إال أن عمل أليكسيس كارل‪ ،‬الحائز على جائزة نوبل‪ ،‬أدى‪ ،‬في‬ ‫ً‬ ‫رائدا في خياطة‬ ‫نهاية المطاف‪ ،‬إلى نجاح جراحين مثل هاري بنك الذي كان‬ ‫األوعية الدموية الصغيرة وإصالح إصابات كبيرة‪.‬‬

‫‪11‬‬

‫‪www.kaust.edu.sa‬‬

‫اليدان والوجه‬ ‫لم يكتف النتيري بالحديث عن زرع النسج الطرية فحسب‪ ،‬بل تحدث عن زرع العظام‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا‪ .‬وهو يجري عملية زرع الطعم الخيفي‪ ،‬أي نقل النسيج والعظم من متبرعين‬ ‫إلى مستقبلين‪ ،‬التي تحققت بفضل التطورات التاريخية الكثيرة في جراحة األوعية‬ ‫وعلم المناعة التي تناولها في بداية كلمته‪.‬‬ ‫الرواد بالفشل طوال‬ ‫وقال النتيري‪" :‬لقد باءت محاوالت الزرع التي أجراها األطباء ّ‬ ‫ً‬ ‫نظرا إلى عدم توفر التقنيات واألدوية المالئمة‪ .‬وعلى سبيل المثال‪ ،‬فقد‬ ‫قرون‪،‬‬ ‫أجريت أول عملية زرع يد في ‪ ،1963‬ولكنها لم تتكلل بالنجاح بسبب عدم توفر‬ ‫للحد من رفض نظام المناعة للنسيج الغريب‪ .‬ولم تعرف جراحات‬ ‫األدوية الالزمة‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫الطعم الخيفي طريقها إلى التطبيق إال بعد تطوير المجموعة المناسبة من‬ ‫األدوية"‪.‬‬ ‫وتحدث النتيري عبر الفيديو عن سيدة في فرنسا فقدت ذراعيها ورجليها بسبب‬ ‫عدوى‪ .‬وقررت‪ ،‬بعد تسع سنوات من استعانتها باألعضاء الصناعية‪ ،‬أن تحاول عملية‬ ‫زرع يد ثنائية وذراع‪ ،‬وتكللت العملية الجراحية المتطورة‪ ،‬التي أسهم النتيري في‬ ‫إجرائها‪ ،‬بالنجاح في نهاية المطاف‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا في‬ ‫وبعيدا عن الجوانب التاريخية والتقنية لجراحة زرع األعضاء‪ ،‬أسهب النتيري‬ ‫الحديث عن األخالق المهنية لزرع األعضاء في مقابلته الحية مع جامعة الملك‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا في سياق كلمته الرئيسية‪.‬‬ ‫عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‪ ،‬كما تحدث عنها‬ ‫قال النتيري في سياق كلمته الرئيسية‪" :‬ال يمكننا قطف وجه أو ذراع دون مراعاة‬ ‫المتوفى وعائلته‪ .‬وعندما نأخذ هذه األعضاء من متبرع‪ ،‬فإننا نستبدلها بأعضاء‬ ‫ً‬ ‫حرصا على سالمة جثمان المتوفى‪ .‬فاألخالق المهنية تملي علينا أن‬ ‫صناعية وقناع‬ ‫نعامل كافة المرضى‪ ،‬متبرعين ومستقبلين‪ ،‬بالمستوى نفسه من االحترام"‪.‬‬ ‫قد ال تكون "الجراحة" هي مستقبل الجراحة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫بديال‬ ‫جزءا من كلمته للحديث عن زراعة النسج الجديدة باعتبارها‬ ‫وأفرد النتيري‬ ‫إلجراءات زرع األعضاء وزرع الطعم الخيفي (الزرع من متبرع)‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫قائال‪" :‬بفضل هندسة النسج‪ ،‬ربما نتمكن‬ ‫وعبر النتيري عن رأيه بمستقبل الجراحة‬ ‫في المستقبل من زراعة النسج الحيوانية والبشرية في سقاالت الخلية‪ .‬لقد نزع‬ ‫رواد مثل هارلد سي‪ .‬أوت خاليا صغيرة من متبرعين وزرعوا أعضاء جديدة‪ ،‬ولكن‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ممكنا بعد"‪.‬‬ ‫تخليق أعضاء جديدة كاملة الحجم ليس‬ ‫وأضاف‪" :‬في نهاية المطاف‪ ،‬أعتقد أن المستقبل سيكون للهندسة البيولوجية‪،‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫تقريبا"‪.‬‬ ‫وأننا سنجني ثمار ذلك في غضون السنوات العشر القادمة‬

A taxonomy of great science

By David Murphy Acclaimed author and physicist Alan Lightman recently gave a keynote address on the great scientific discoveries of the 20th century and the scientists responsible for these discoveries as part of this year’s Enrichment in the Spring Program.

In an enlightening talk, the author of the international best-seller "Einstein's Dreams" and "The Diagnosis" and others and professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT skimmed through an analysis of 25 of the most important scientific discoveries and discoverers of our time—discoveries that have radically changed our notions of the world and our place in it.

His presentation entitled “The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-Century Science” covered everything from the theory of relativity to mapping the structure of DNA and was based on his 2005 book "The Discoveries.”

The great scientific discoveries of our time Lightman, whose literary essays and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, discussed some of the great scientists and their discoveries from 1021 A.D. up through 1972. Highlights from Lightman's talk included the works of the great Muslim scholar Ibn al-Haytham for his understanding of vision, optics and light (1021 AD); Max Planck for the discovery of the quantum (1900); Ernest Starling and William Bayliss for their research on hormones (1902); Albert Einstein for elucidating the particle nature of light (1905); Ernest Rutherford for the nucleus of the atom (1911); Max von Laue for the size of the cosmos (1912); Neils Bohr for the quantum atom (1913); Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner for nuclear fission (1939); Francis Crick and James Watson for the structure of DNA (1953); and Paul Berg’s research on recombinant DNA in 1972.

He examined one case study in detail: the discovery of the cosmic distance scale by the American astronomer and early pioneer Henrietta Leavitt in 1912. Leavitt's work culminated in the discovery of the relation between the luminosity and the period of cepheid variable stars—a discovery which became one of the cornerstones of modern astronomical science.

“When you look up at the sky you only see a two dimensional picture. You see a cluster of stars—and you don't know if it's a separate galaxy—because you don't know the size of our galaxy. The distance to other galaxies was determined through Leavitt's theory,” Lightman said. “Unfortunately and unbelievably, Leavitt died prematurely of cancer in 1921 and didn't even receive a professorship or a big award during her lifetime.”

Lightman pointed out that although there have been a number of important scientific discoveries and contributions from women throughout history, women simply haven’t had the same opportunities as their male peers. He insisted that this is a trend that needs to change in the future, and, to this end, he founded the Harpswell Foundation, the mission of which is to empower a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.

12

THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

“Women should be encouraged in science. Worldwide, women are not encouraged to go into science half as much as men are—and that's something that we are going to have to work on,” he said.

A 'taxonomy' of scientific discovery Lightman, who has a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology, discussed what he described as a "taxonomy" of scientific discovery and how it applied to the scientists in question.

“In most discoveries there's a kind of synthesis involved.

Discoveries can follow periods of being stuck— sometimes, scientists can find what they are looking for by not looking at all,” Lightman said.

With a wealth of experience in scientific research and reportage, Lightman also dispensed some advice for current students and researchers and for the scientists of the future who might have run into a brick wall in their research and findings.

“Don’t despair when you are stuck. In fact. I encourage you [students and researchers] to get stuck. It gives you time to think, and you could be on the edge of a great discovery—great discoveries can follow periods of being stuck,” Lightman said.

He also implored those same budding science writers, students and researchers not to be afraid to critique the science behind their profession and chosen field.

“Don't think of science with rose-colored glasses. Don’t be afraid of critiquing the science. A lot of the world— especially today—is scientific and highly technical.

We must think critically about the science behind the discovery. Sometimes these discoveries might not have been ethical or used improper principles. In the field of science, we don’t want to train cheerleaders. We want to train people who can put science into a context and place,” he said.

The prepared mind In keeping with the theme of this year’s Enrichment in the Spring program, Lightman, whose research on general relativity, radiation processes and stellar dynamics, along with his literary credentials, can be classified as a true pioneer of science, concluded his address by highlighting how his involvement with science continues to inform his day-to-day activities.

“Science informs my writing. The subject matter, the culture, the ethos—that’s what I draw from. Unlike artists, scientists work on problems that ultimately have a solution.

It may take one to 10 years plus, but the solution exists. If the scientist is committed to the discovery, he or she will eventually make the breakthrough,” he emphasized.

“I don't think there's been enough time for analysis to say what has been the best discovery of the 20th century. You need a certain amount of time to know the importance of a discovery. In my opinion, not one great scientific discovery has been made by an amateur. All the great discoveries were by scientists with 'prepared minds'—they had studied their subjects, they had mastered their craft and they were highly skilled individuals—they were the experts,” he concluded.

‫تصنيف الكتشافات‬ ‫علمية عظيمة‬ ‫في كلمته التثقيفية‪ ،‬في برنامج االثراء الربيعي‪ ،‬تحدث األستاذ الممارس في‬ ‫العلوم اإلنسانية في معهد ماساتشوستس للتقنية‪ ،‬ومؤلف كتابي "أحالم‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫عالما‬ ‫مبيعا في العالم‪ ،‬عن أهم ‪25‬‬ ‫إينشتاين" و"التشخيص"‪ ،‬وهما من أكثر الكتب‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫غيرت مفاهيمنا عن‬ ‫واكتشافا‬ ‫علميا في عصرنا الحالي‪ ،‬أي االكتشافات التي ّ‬ ‫تغييرا جذريا‪ً.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫العالم وموقعنا فيه‬ ‫وغطى عرضه التقديمي‪ ،‬الذي حمل عنوان "االكتشافات‪ :‬إنجازات علمية عظيمة‬ ‫وانتهاء بوضع خارطة بنية الحمض‬ ‫ابتداء بالنظرية النسبية‬ ‫في القرن العشرين"‪،‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫استنادا إلى كتابه "االكتشافات" الذي ّألفه في ‪.2005‬‬ ‫النووي‪ ،‬وذلك‬

‫االكتشافات العلمية العظيمة في عصرنا‬ ‫تناول اليتمان‪ ،‬الذي نشرت مواده ومقاالته األدبية في "أتالنتيك" و"غرانتا"‬ ‫و"هاربرز" و"نيويوركر" وفي "نيويورك ريفيو أوف بوكس" على سبيل المثال ال‬ ‫ابتداء من عام ‪ 1021‬للميالد‬ ‫الحصر‪ ،‬بعض العلماء العظماء واختراعاتهم‪ ،‬وذلك‬ ‫ً‬ ‫حتى ‪ .1972‬وتطرق في كلمته إلى أعمال العالم المسلم العظيم ابن الهيثم‬ ‫وفهمه للرؤية والبصريات والضوء (‪ 1021‬للميالد)؛ وماكس بالنك على اختراعه‬ ‫نظرية الكم (‪)1900‬؛ وإرنست ستارلنغ ووليام بايليس على أبحاثهما في مجال‬ ‫الهرمونات (‪)1902‬؛ وألبرت إينشتاين لتوضيح وشرح الطبيعة الجسيمية للضوء‬ ‫(‪)1905‬؛ وإرنست رذرفورد على أبحاثه في مجال نواة الذرة (‪)1911‬؛ وماكس فون‬ ‫الوي على قياس الكون (‪)١٩١٢‬؛ ونيلز بور على ميكانيك الكم في الذرة (‪)1913‬؛‬ ‫وأوتو هان وليز ميتنر على االنصهار النووي (‪)1939‬؛ وفرانسيس كريك وجيمس‬ ‫واتسون على بنية الحمض النووي (‪)1953‬؛ وأبحاث بول بيرغ في مجال أبحاث‬ ‫الحمض النووي المعاد تركيبه في ‪.1972‬‬ ‫وتناول بالتفصيل دراسة حالة عن اكتشاف مقياس المسافة الكونية في ‪1912‬‬ ‫من قبل عالمة الفلك األمريكية الرائدة هينرييتا ليفيت‪ ،‬التي أصبح اكتشافها‬ ‫للعالقة بين اللمعان والتغاير الدوري في إضاءة النجوم‪ ،‬من ركائز العلم الحديث‪،‬‬ ‫وكان بمثابة تتويج ألعمالها‪.‬‬ ‫وقال اليتمان‪" :‬عندما ننظر إلى السماء‪ ،‬لن نرى إال صورة ثنائية األبعاد‪ .‬سنرى‬ ‫مجموعة من النجوم‪ ،‬دون أن نعلم إن كانت من مجرة أخرى‪ ،‬ألننا نجهل حجم‬ ‫مجرتنا‪ .‬لقد أسهمت نظرية ليفيت في تحديد المسافة بين مجرتنا والمجرات‬ ‫األخرى"‪ .‬وأضاف‪" :‬ولسوء الحظ‪ ،‬فقد فارقت ليفيت الحياة بصورة مفاجئة في عمر‬ ‫مبكر في ‪ 1921‬قبل أن تنال األستاذية أو أي جائزة كبيرة خالل حياتها"‪.‬‬ ‫وأشار اليتمان إلى أن النساء لم يحصلن على الفرص نفسها التي نالها الرجال على‬ ‫وشدد على‬ ‫الرغم من االكتشافات والمساهمات العلمية الكثيرة لهن عبر التاريخ‪.‬‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫ً‬ ‫اتجاها ينبغي تغييره في المستقبل‪ .‬وهذا ما دفعه إلى تأسيس‬ ‫أن هذا يمثل‬ ‫مؤسسة هاربسويل التي تسعى لتمكين جيل جديد من النساء الرائدات في جنوب‬ ‫شرق آسيا‪ .‬وقال‪" :‬ينبغي تشجيع النساء في مجال العلوم‪ .‬فالنساء في العالم‬ ‫بأسره ال يحصلن إال على نصف ما يناله الرجال من تشجيع على دخول معترك‬ ‫الميدان العلمي‪ ،‬وذلك شيء ينبغي أن نعمل على إصالحه"‪.‬‬

‫"تصنيف" لالكتشافات العلمية‬ ‫ناقش اليتمان‪ ،‬الذي حصل على درجة الدكتوراه في الفيزياء من معهد كاليفورنيا‬ ‫للتقنية‪ ،‬ما وصفه بأنه "تصنيف" لالكتشافات العلمية‪ ،‬وكيف يمكن تطبيقه على‬ ‫العلماء الذين تناولهم في كلمته‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫وغالبا ما تأتي‬ ‫وقال‪" :‬تنطوي االكتشافات بمعظمها على نوع من وضع الحلول‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أحيانا إيجاد ما‬ ‫هذه االكتشافات بعد فترات من االستعصاء‪ .‬ويستطيع العلماء‬ ‫يبحثون عنه من خالل عدم البحث على اإلطالق"‪.‬‬ ‫وأسدى اليتمان‪ ،‬الذي يتمتع بخبرة واسعة في األبحاث والتحقيقات العلمية‪،‬‬ ‫بعض النصائح للطالب والباحثين الحاليين ولعلماء المستقبل‪ ،‬الذين قد تصل أبحاثهم‬ ‫ونتائجهم إلى حائط مسدود‪.‬‬ ‫وقال‪" :‬ال تسمحوا لليأس بأن يتسرب إليكم عندما تصلون إلى حائط مسدود‪.‬‬ ‫وفي الحقيقة‪ ،‬أنا أشجعكم (أيها الطلبة والباحثين) على الوقوع في مأزق‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫وقتا للتفكير‪ :‬فقد تكونون على شفا حفرة من اكتشاف عظيم‪.‬‬ ‫فهذا يمنحكم‬ ‫فاالكتشافات العظيمة تأتي عادة في أعقاب فترات من الصعوبات"‪.‬‬ ‫كما ناشد الكتاب والطلبة والباحثين الصاعدين بأال يشعروا بالخوف من انتقاد‬ ‫العلوم التي يستند إليها اختصاصهم والميدان الذي اختاروه‪.‬‬ ‫وأضاف‪" :‬ال تنظروا إلى العلم نظرة مثالية‪ .‬وال تتهيبوا انتقاده‪ .‬فجزء كبير من‬ ‫العالم‪ ،‬وخاصة في عصرنا هذا‪ ،‬علمي وعالي التقنية‪ .‬وينبغي أن نفكر بصورة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ناقدة بالعلوم التي تكمن وراء االكتشافات‪ ،‬التي قد ال يكون معظمها أخالقيا أو‬ ‫يستخدم مبادئ مالئمة‪ .‬وال حاجة بنا في الميدان العلمي إلى تدريب مجموعة من‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫المهللين‪ ،‬بل نرغب في تدريب من يستطيعون وضع العلم في سياق ومكان"‪.‬‬

‫العقل المستعد‬ ‫ً‬ ‫التزاما منه بموضوع هذا العام من برنامج اإلثراء في الربيع‪ ،‬اختتم اليتمان‪ ،‬الذي‬ ‫تضعه أبحاثه في مجال النسبية العامة وعمليات اإلشعاع والديناميات النجمية‪ ،‬إلى‬ ‫جانب مؤهالته األدبية‪ ،‬في مصاف رواد العلم الحقيقيين‪ ،‬اختتم كلمته بتسليط‬ ‫الضوء على اهتماماته العلمية وكيف تثري نشاطه اليومي‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫قائال‪" :‬تعزز العلوم كتابتي‪ .‬وأنا أستند إلى الموضوع المطروح‬ ‫وأكد اليتمان‬ ‫والثقافة والروح المعنوية‪ .‬وبخالف الفنانين‪ ،‬يعمل العلماء على مسائل لها حل‬ ‫في نهاية المطاف‪ .‬وقد يستغرق إيجاد الحل عشر سنوات أو أكثر‪ ،‬ولكن الحل‬ ‫موجود‪ .‬وإذا التزم العلماء باالكتشافات‪ ،‬سيحققون إنجازات في نهاية المطاف"‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫كافيا قد انقضى كي نحدد االكتشاف‬ ‫وقتا‬ ‫قائال‪" :‬ال أعتقد أن‬ ‫وانتهى في حديثه‬ ‫األفضل في القرن العشرين‪ .‬وال بد من مضي فترة كافية من الوقت لمعرفة‬ ‫هاو أي اكتشاف علمي عظيم برأيي‪ ،‬فقد‬ ‫أهمية االكتشاف‪ .‬ولم يحقق أي ٍ‬ ‫تحققت كافة االكتشافات الرائعة على يدي علماء من أصحاب "العقول‬ ‫المستعدة"‪ ،‬فقد درسوا مواضيعهم‪ ،‬وأتقنوا حرفتهم‪ ،‬وكانوا من أصحاب المهارة‬ ‫العالية‪ ،‬أي كانوا هم الخبراء"‪.‬‬

‫‪Acclaimed author, science writer and physicist‬‬ ‫‪Alan Lightman reflected on some of the great‬‬ ‫‪science and scientists of the 20th century‬‬ ‫‪during this year's Enrichment in the Spring‬‬ ‫‪program. Photo by Ginger Lisanti.‬‬

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‫‪www.kaust.edu.sa‬‬

Ancient disruptors of the Islamic Golden Age

By Meres J. Weche

The word “disruptors” is often bandied about these days in discussions about tech startups and Silicon Valley.

The Cambridge dictionary loosely describes disruptors as those who change the traditional in which a paradigm operates—especially in a new and effective way. South African-born historian and imagineer Mike Bruton recently came to KAUST as part of the 2017 Enrichment in the Spring program to discuss great disruptors of the scientific method from the House of Wisdom, or Bayt alHikma, during the Islamic Golden Age spanning the 8th to the 13th centuries C.E. “The scientists I'll describe today were not just pioneers, they were masters of their craft—most of whom were years ahead in their research,” Bruton said during his KAUST keynote address.

The great Islamic scholars from Bayt al-Hikma made contributions in many different fields, Bruton noted, including introducing the concept of zero, which allowed mathematicians to explore orders of magnitude and decimals, and the debunking of the Greek theory of sight which said that rays emanated from the eyes.

“Today we use the term 'disruptive,' and this very much applies to the work they did because they didn’t just build on the work of the ancients, they totally disrupted the direction of science and technology. They created new ways of doing things and looking at things,” said Bruton.

The Dark Age that never was Many people in the West and beyond believe that the period from the end of the Greek era to the Renaissance was essentially a scientific desert. As Burton explained, however, “Nothing could be further from the truth. It was a time of great scientific productivity carried out almost entirely in the Islamic world.” The highly detailed chronicles of the work from these Islamic scholars laid the foundation for modern civilization.

Historian and imagineer Mike Bruton speaks at KAUST as part of the Enrichment in the Spring program, discussing the great disruptors of the scientific method from the House of Wisdom, or Bayt al-Hikma, during the Islamic Golden Age. Photo by Ginger Lisanti.

14

THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

A perhaps little-know fact is that the decision by UNESCO to name 2015 the International Year of Light was to mark the 1,000-year anniversary of the publication of Ibn al-Haytham’s (965 to 1040 C.E.) famous book of optics. In this seven-volume treatise, Ibn al-Haytham completely revolutionized knowledge of how the eye works, how vision works and the properties of light. He was also the first to demonstrate that light bounces off objects from light sources like the sun or candles and enters our eyes.

“He was a serious disruptor in terms of contemporary thought,” Bruton said.

The Bayt al-Hikma: a global incubator of ideas Another relevant Silicon Valley concept is that of the incubator—a setting where potential disruptors are offered the space and resources to nurture their ideas. In this vein, Bruton purported that one of the reasons why science flourished under Islam during the Golden Age is because the caliphs and sultans of the time had strong ethics for the patronage of science.

“They considered it a prestige to have the greatest scholars, the biggest libraries, the best astronomical observatories and the most comprehensive House of Wisdom in their caliphate—it was a status symbol,” said Bruton. “There was this 'ethic of innovation'—of constantly improving on the status quo.”

The vast expanse of the Islamic world at the time, which stretched from Spain in the West to China in the East, meant that ideas were flowing. The Arabic language was also used very widely.

“There was this ethic of encyclopedism—in other words, they were compelled to write down their knowledge and pass it on to future generations,” Burton explained, which means that a huge amount of effort was put into translation.

experimentalist who sought to prove everything through experiments, and he helped establish the scientific method of testing an idea through experiment and observation.

He was also a bit of an elitist, writing in a style that was intentionally out of reach for non-specialists of the time.

“The ancient works in Greek, Sanskrit and Persian and others languages were translated into Arabic to make them available to Arabic scholars and then subsequently into Latin and English,” he continued.

“Interestingly, the word 'jibberish' comes from Jabir ibn Hayyan's surname due to the quite intricate and complicated descriptions and specialized jargon of his work,” said Bruton.

Recording and sharing the memory of the ancient Islamic scholars

Ismail Al-Jazari (1136 to 1206 C.E.), another great innovator of the time, was an engineer and polymath best known as the father of robotics. He built a robotic man as well as various clocks, including the first portable clock and the impressive Elephant Clock. Al-Jazari detailed his work in "The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices."

It was part of the Islamic scholars’ work ethic to record their findings and research before they died. They were in fact great science communicators and took great care in detailing and documenting all aspects of their experiments, creations and discoveries.

Al-Kindi (801 to 873 C.E.), who is considered one of the 12 greatest minds in history, wrote a very detailed book in which he described the 50 mechanical devices and machines that he developed, and he provided accurate drawings of them. He played a major role in introducing Arabic numerals and zero into arithmetic—work that was carried on by the scientists who followed him.

Although the research theses of the early Islamic scholars are well-documented, they are unfortunately not wellknown in the West. Through his background in science and his interest in studying innovation and creativity, as well as pulling from his experience as a science communicator, Bruton has traveled the world with an exhibition showcasing the achievements of the ancient House of Wisdom. He was also a consultant for the construction of the KAUST Museum Of Science and Technology in Islam.

Jabir ibn Hayyan (721 to 815 C.E.) is regarded as the father of quantitative chemistry who pioneered many of the techniques that are still in use today. He was a great

www.kaust.edu.sa

15

Conquering your doorstep mile

By David Murphy Explorer and author Alastair Humphreys gave an entertaining and insightful keynote lecture detailing the life and travails of a modern adventurer as part of this year’s Enrichment in the Spring program. The affable British explorer spoke to the KAUST community on April 18, as he detailed his travels, anecdotes, inspirations, fears, aspirations, motivations and goals, as well as sharing advice and encouragement.

Humphreys regaled the audience with tales of his travels, including a four-year bicycle trip from his home in Oxford, U.K.—and back again—via Europe, Africa, the Americas and Siberia in wintertime (a journey of 46,000 miles through 60 countries and five continents). He spoke of his trek across the Empty Quarter with his fellow traveler Leon McCarron, during which they pulled a nearly 700 kilogram cart across 1,000 miles of barren vastness. He also detailed his more recent trips—a transatlantic 3,000 mile, 45-day rowing expedition with a couple of "Slovenian blokes," he said, and a journey of walking across Spain inspired by Laurie Lee’s “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning,” with only a violin for his pay and company.

Each travel story was framed with boundless enthusiasm from Humphreys, who drew much laughter and enjoyment from the audience as he detailed his sometimes haphazard adventures with engaging imagery and tales of the characters and situations he encountered.

'People who are a lot smarter than I am' In his opening remarks, Humphreys spoke of his joy at visiting the University, noting, “I'm very excited to have finally made it to the Kingdom and to KAUST. One thing I’ve noticed since I got here is that there are a lot of smart people here—people who are a lot smarter than I am.”

Humphreys’ 2012 Empty Quarter trek was inspired by the great British explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, and in particular Thesiger's trek across the Arabian Peninsula and Empty Quarter that he chronicled in vivid detail in his 1959 book “Arabian Sands.”

“Thesiger’s book is like a love letter to the people of Arabia, and it inspired me to travel through the Empty Quarter. I didn't want to go on a trip where I didn't know anything, but I joined up with people who know everything. I would then become a tourist and I didn't want that,” Humphreys said.

“Deserts are very simple places. They are very simple but not easy," he continued. "I think some of the best adventures are like the desert—simple but not easy. The trip—like any other trip I've taken—is the culmination of many tiny, tiny steps.”

The many barriers to adventure Humphreys also encouraged the audience to not fear or to shy away from extended travel and adventure or from stepping outside their "safety zones."

“Cycling around the world is not what normal people do, but after my trip, I realized I can do something different. I had confidence and momentum and that, for me, is worth more than any money,” Humphreys said.

people who took a risk—people who thought boldly. There are so many barriers that stop us from living as adventurously as we could. A lot of these barriers are in our heads—a lot of the time we talk ourselves out of the race before we reach the starting line,” he noted.

“Leave aside the thoughts of death and ask yourself: 'What is the worst thing that could possibly happen on an adventure?'

The sensible thing to do is to carry on with a simple life, but unfortunately we can't get eternal happiness from sitting on the couch eating ice cream and watching football,” he said

Leave space for a 'microadventure' Humphreys extolled the audience to start small, reminding them that all great adventures start with small steps. He coined a term—"microadventures"—for these smaller and more manageable trips close to home for people with normal lives.

These trips being that they are not prescriptive, leaving scope for people to interpret them however they want to and come up with original ideas of their own.

“Being adventurous means doing things that are new to you.

Even with a 9 to 5 job, you can also go on microadventures after work. Don’t let the '9 to 5 grind' become another excuse,” he said.

Throughout the talk, he constantly referred to the phrase "the doorstep mile" as both his travel and lifestyle mantra. The doorstep mile is a Norwegian expression to explain the first few steps of a (long) journey as being the most difficult to undertake.

“If you want something to get done, you have to begin it. Think of your own doorstep mile as the small step you can do to get yourself going. Once you get past your own doorstep mile, what’s stopping you from continuing on?” Humphreys asked.

Seize the day With such an impressive travel C.V. to his name, Humphreys noted that a lot of the people, cultures and traditions he encountered on his trips were completely at odds with how they are portrayed in mainstream media and in conventional thought.

“People told me not to go out into the world and visit certain countries, but I ignored them. Traveling to some of the most disadvantaged regions of the world has made me a lot more grateful, and meeting people with few resources made me even more determined not to waste my opportunities. The kindness of random people around the world was one of my fondest memories—a kindness that is at odds with what we see on television,” he said.

“If an expedition doesn't have many challenges, it becomes a gentle holiday," he said. "Adventures are all the better for being unexpected. I want to do a trip that when I'm old I look back on and can be proud of. With everything in life, we have a choice how to see it. We can see everything in life as either a constraint or we can see it as a freedom."

“I love trying new things and living quickly. Most of my trips have been influenced by my heroes. Heroes are people to aspire to be, but my heroes are just normal people—normal

1, 2. British author and explorer Alastair

Humphreys (1) described his adventures to the KAUST community during this year's Enrichment in the Spring program, including his trek across the Empty Quarter (2).

Photo 2 courtesy of Alastair Humphreys.

Image of the Empty Quarter courtesy of Shutterstock.

16

THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

‫‪1‬‬

‫‪2‬‬

‫تجاوز الخطوة األولى‬ ‫القى الكاتب والمستكشف أالستير همفريز محاضرة رئيسية ممتعة متبصرة‪،‬‬ ‫تحدث فيها بالتفصيل عن حياته وأسفاره‪ ،‬وذلك في إطار برنامج اإلثراء في الربيع‬ ‫يكتف المستكشف البريطاني الدمث بالتحدث إلى مجتمع‬ ‫لهذا العام‪ .‬ولم‬ ‫ِ‬ ‫جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية يوم الثالثاء ‪ 18‬أبريل بالتفصيل عن أسفاره‬ ‫وحكاياته وإلهامه ومخاوفه وطموحاته ودوافعه وأهدافه‪ ،‬بل شجع الحضور‬ ‫وأسدى لهم بعض النصائح‪.‬‬

‫وأضاف‪" :‬أهوى تجربة أشياء جديدة وإيقاع الحياة السريع‪ .‬لقد تأثرت أكثر رحالتي‬ ‫بأبطالي‪ .‬واألبطال هم األشخاص الذين يطمح الناس ألن يحذوا حذوهم‪ ،‬ولكن‬ ‫أبطالي كانوا مجرد أشخاص عاديين أقدموا على المخاطرة‪ ،‬وفكروا بجرأة‪ .‬هناك‬ ‫عوائق كثيرة تمنعنا من اإلقدام على المخاطرة قدر ما نستطيع‪ ،‬ولكن أكثر هذه‬ ‫ً‬ ‫فكثيرا ما ننسحب من السباق قبل أن تطأ‬ ‫العوائق موجودة في أذهاننا فقط‪.‬‬ ‫أقدامنا خط االنطالق"‪.‬‬

‫وأمتع همفريز الحضور بالقصص التي رواها عن أسفاره؛ ومنها رحلة دامت أربع‬ ‫سنوات‪ ،‬انطلق فيها من موطنه في أكسفورد في بريطانيا‪ ،‬وجاب على دراجته‬ ‫الهوائية أوروبا وأفريقيا واألمريكيتين وسيبيريا في فصل الشتاء (رحلة بطول ‪46‬‬ ‫ألف ميل زار خاللها ‪ً 60‬‬ ‫بلدا وخمس قارات) ليعود بعد ذلك إلى موطنه؛ وتحدث‬ ‫بجر عربة‬ ‫عن رحلته عبر الربع الخالي مع زميله ليون مكارون‪ ،‬التي قاما خاللها ّ‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا عن أحدث‬ ‫لمسافة ‪ 1,000‬ميل في الصحراء القاحلة؛ كما تحدث بالتفصيل‬ ‫رحالته‪ ،‬التي قطع خاللها ‪ 3‬آالف ميل عبر المحيط األطلسي‪ ،‬واستغرقت ‪ 45‬يوماً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫سيرا على‬ ‫من التجديف مع "شابين سلوفينيين ضخمي الجثة"؛ ورحلته عبر إسبانيا‬ ‫األقدام‪ ،‬وهي رحلة استوحاها من رحلة لوري لي "عندما مشيت في أحد صباحات‬ ‫منتصف الصيف" مع كمان فقط لتأمين المصاريف والصحبة‪.‬‬

‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫جانبا أفكار الموت‪ ،‬واسألوا أنفسكم ما هو أسوأ شيء‬ ‫ممازحا‪" :‬ضعوا‬ ‫وأكمل‬ ‫قد يحدث أثناء مغامرة؟ لعل الحياة البسيطة هي الشيء األسلم‪ ،‬ولكنك‪ ،‬لسوء‬ ‫الحظ‪ ،‬لن تحقق السعادة األبدية وأنت جالس على األريكة تتناول المثلجات وتتابع‬ ‫كرة القدم"‪.‬‬

‫وأضفى همفريز على كل سفرة من أسفاره ً‬ ‫جوا من الحماس الشديد‪ ،‬مما أمتع‬ ‫الحضور المتفاعلين مع حديثه وأضحكهم‪ ،‬وخاصة عندما تحدث بالتفصيل عن‬ ‫مغامرات حدثت معه بالصدفة‪ .‬وكانت مغامرات حافلة بالصور الساحرة والقصص‬ ‫الشيقة وبذكر العديد من الشخصيات والمواقف التي واجهته خالل سنوات‪.‬‬

‫ذكاء مني‘‬ ‫’األشخاص األكثر‬ ‫ً‬ ‫تحدث همفريز في كلمته االفتتاحية عن بالغ سروره بزيارة الجامعة‪ ،‬وقال‪:‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أخيرا من زيارة المملكة العربية السعودية‬ ‫"بداية‪ ،‬أشعر بإثارة كبيرة ألنني تمكنت‬ ‫وجامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‪ .‬ومن األشياء التي أثارت انتباهي منذ‬ ‫ذكاء مني‬ ‫أشد‬ ‫وصولي إلى هنا وجود عدد كبير من األشخاص الالمعين‪ ،‬أشخاص‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫ً‬ ‫بكثير"‪.‬‬ ‫لقد استوحى همفريز رحلته في الربع الخالي ‪ 2012‬من رحلة المستكشف‬ ‫البريطاني العظيم سير ويلفريد ثيسيغر في شبه الجزيرة العربية والربع الخالي‪،‬‬ ‫ودون تفاصيل دقيقة وواضحة عنها في كتابه "الرمال العربية" الذي‬ ‫التي أرخها‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫صدر في ‪.1959‬‬ ‫وقال همفريز‪" :‬يعتبر كتاب ثيسيغر رسالة محبة إلى الناس هنا‪ ،‬إلى شعب‬ ‫المملكة العربية السعودية‪ .‬لقد شجعني على السفر عبر الربع الخالي‪ .‬ولم أكن‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫تماما برفقة أشخاص يعرفون كل شيء‪ .‬ألنني‪،‬‬ ‫راغبا في رحلة إلى مكان أجهله‬ ‫في هذه الحالة‪ ،‬لن أكون سوى سائح‪ ،‬ولم يكن هذا مبتغاي"‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫وأضاف‪" :‬الصحراء مكان بسيط ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫سهال‪ .‬أعتقد أن‬ ‫مكانا‬ ‫جدا‪ ،‬ولكنها ليست‬ ‫المغامرات الجيدة تشبه الصحراء‪ ،‬بسيطة ولكنها ليست سهلة‪ .‬وكانت رحلتي‪،‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫تتويجا لخطوات صعبة كثيرة قطعتها"‪.‬‬ ‫كأي رحلة قمت بها‪،‬‬ ‫العوائق الكثيرة التي تعترض سبيل المغامرة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا الحاضرين على عدم الخوف من أفكار المغامرات واألسفار‬ ‫شجع همفريز‬ ‫الطويلة‪ ،‬أو من مغادرة "مناطق أمانهم"‪.‬‬ ‫وقال‪" :‬لن يطوف شخص عادي العالم على دراجته الهوائية‪ ،‬ولكنني أدركت بعد‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مفعما بالثقة واالندفاع‪ ،‬وهذا‬ ‫رحلتي أنني قادر على فعل شيء مختلف‪ .‬كنت‬ ‫أثمن عندي من المال"‪.‬‬

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‫‪www.kaust.edu.sa‬‬

‫أفسحوا المجال لـ ’مغامرة صغيرة‘‬ ‫ناشد همفريز‪ ،‬الذي أجاب على كافة األسئلة الواقعية التي تتعلق باإلجهاد‪/‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مذكرا إياهم بأن كافة‬ ‫ضغط الوقت‪ ،‬الحضور بأن تكون بدايتهم متواضعة‪،‬‬ ‫المغامرات العظيمة بدأت بخطوات صغيرة‪.‬‬ ‫ونحت همفريز مصطلح "مغامرات صغيرة" الذي يقصد به الرحالت الصغيرة سهلة‬ ‫اإلدارة القابلة للتحقيق القريبة من المنزل لمن يعيشون حياة عادية‪ .‬وال ينبغي‬ ‫تحديد أهداف هذه الرحالت أو مواصفاتها‪ ،‬بل ينبغي أن نترك مهمة تفسيرها‬ ‫للناس كي يخرجوا بأفكار نابعة من خيالهم‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا الذهاب في مغامرة‬ ‫قال‪" :‬تعني المغامرة أن تفعل أشياء جديدة‪ .‬ويمكنك‬ ‫صغيرة بعد العمل حتى لو كنت تعمل من الساعة التاسعة إلى الخامسة‪ .‬ال تجعل‬ ‫ً‬ ‫عذرا آخر"‪.‬‬ ‫من عملك الروتيني‬ ‫وواظب همفريز طوال كلمته على استخدام عبارة "ميل عتبة الباب"‪ ،‬باعتبارها‬ ‫شعار أسفاره ونمط حياته‪ .‬وميل عتبة الباب تعبير نرويجي يعتبر أن الخطوات‬ ‫القليلة األولى من رحلة (طويلة) هي الخطوات األكثر صعوبة‪.‬‬ ‫تساءل همفريز‪" :‬إذا رغبت في إنجاز شيء ما‪ ،‬ينبغي أن تبدأ به‪ .‬فكر بخطواتك‬ ‫القليلة األولى الصعبة‪ ،‬وفكر بالخطوة الصغيرة التي يمكنك اتخاذها لتساعدك‬ ‫على االنطالق‪ .‬وحالما تفرغ من الخطوة األولى‪ ،‬فما الذي يمنعك من االستمرار"‪.‬‬

‫اغتنموا الفرصة‬ ‫لقد شعر همفريز خالل أسفاره ورحالته الكثيرة المتميزة بأن الكثير من الشعوب‬ ‫ً‬ ‫تماما عن الصورة المرسومة لها‬ ‫والثقافات والتقاليد التي تعرف عليها مختلفة‬ ‫في وسائل اإلعالم الرئيسية والتفكير التقليدي‪.‬‬ ‫وأضاف‪" :‬لقد تجاهلت نصائح كثيرة كانت تدعوني إلى تجنّ ب زيارة بلدان محددة‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫امتنانا‪ ،‬وجعلني‬ ‫فقد جعلني السفر إلى المناطق التي تعاني من الحرمان أكثر‬ ‫ً‬ ‫عزما على استغالل الفرص‪ .‬وكان‬ ‫لقاء من ال يملكون إال القليل من الموارد أكثر‬ ‫لطف الناس الذين التقيت بهم بمحض الصدفة في مختلف أنحاء العالم من أجمل‬ ‫الذكريات‪ ،‬وهذا يخالف ما نشاهده على شاشة التلفاز"‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫قائال‪" :‬إذا لم تواجه تحديات كثيرة‪ ،‬فلن تكون رحلتك أكثر من عطلة‬ ‫واختتم كالمه‬ ‫لطيفة‪ .‬فالمغامرات المفاجئة هي األفضل‪ ،‬والرحلة التي أرغب في القيام بها‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مسنا‪ .‬ولدينا الخيار عند النظر إلى أي شيء‬ ‫هي الرحلة التي سأعتز بها عندما أصبح‬ ‫ً‬ ‫عائقا أو اعتباره حرية"‪.‬‬ ‫في الحياة‪ .‬ويمكننا اعتباره‬

How to be a successful scientist-entrepreneur

By Meres J. Weche Some scientists are primarily interested in basic discovery, while some are satisfied with seeing the application of their lab research many years later. Certain entrepreneurial scientists, however, are eager to see their technology or inventions out in the marketplace as quickly as possible.

“The way to make that happen most effectively is through entrepreneurial thinking,” said Dr. Eric Fossum, a professor at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth and director of the school’s Ph.D. Innovation Program.

Fossum, a U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee, was featured in the KAUST 2017 Enrichment in the Spring Program.

He's best known for his invention of the complementary metaloxide semiconductor (CMOS) active pixel image sensor, which is used in billions of cameras worldwide. CMOS technology is ubiquitous and is used in webcams, drones, medical imaging devices and many other applications.

Necessity as the mother of invention After completing his Ph.D. at Yale in 1984 and becoming an electrical engineering faculty member at Columbia University, Fossum was recruited to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Caltech, where he managed JPL’s image sensor research unit. His main task was to develop lighter and less energy-hungry cameras for use on NASA’s spacecrafts.

“The cameras that they were using back in those days were really large, like the size of a refrigerator,” Fossum explained.

The reason the onboard camera systems were so large is that they operated with a particular type of image sensor called the charge-coupled device (CCD). The electronics required to make them work made the cameras bulky. Fossum and his team at JPL had to come up with a new image sensor technology that would work as well as the existing technology to allow for the miniaturizing of cameras used on spacecrafts.

“It had to work well or better, and that was when the CMOS image sensor came to be,” said Fossum.

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THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

It soon became apparent that the small size, low power dissipation and energy efficiency of these new technology sensors would be useful in many applications. Chief among these were portable applications where users would require something small, compact and long-lasting in terms of energy consumption.

Opening a new world of possibilities Before the invention of the CMOS sensor, even widely used consumer products like camcorders—themselves running on CCD sensor technology—were relatively large. The bricksized batteries at the back of these 1980s/1990s camcorders only lasted for about an hour, and it was very inconvenient to recharge them so often. The advent of Fossum’s CMOS sensor technology had a significant impact on these types of consumer electronics. Fossum foresaw some of these applications and their ramifications, but others were less expected.

“I didn’t expect that my CMOS sensor technology invention would launch a whole selfie and selfie sticks movement,” said Fossum. The popularity of cat videos was another unforeseen result.

After being somewhat frustrated with the slow pace of action after presenting his new technology to various electronics companies, he created the Photobit Corporation to commercialize the technology in 1995. After a few years of development, he sold the company in 2001. Around that time, cellphone camera applications came along, which made CMOS sensor technology very compelling on the marketplace.

“A lot of companies started pouring R&D funds, and thousands of engineers around the world worked on improving the technology, bringing it to where it is now,” Fossum noted.

When asked if he now regrets selling Photobit just as the wave of camera phones gained momentum, Fossum said the timing was right because, as a small company, Photobit was

2 1 Usually for a new technology to really take hold and displace an incumbent technology, it has to be better in a compelling way—not just like 20 percent better or something like that. It has to be really compelling. The CMOS image sensor was a success because the value proposition wasn’t just a little better. The tech was very compelling."

- Dr. Eric Fossum, Dartmouth professor and the inventor of the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) active pixel image sensor

“Usually for a new technology to really take hold and displace an incumbent technology, it has to be better in a compelling way—not just like 20 percent better or something like that. It has to be really compelling,” said Fossum. “The CMOS image sensor was a success because the value proposition wasn’t just a little better. The tech was very compelling."

According to Fossum, scientists can’t simply assume that they can successfully present new technology and get funding as “that often doesn’t happen. You have to do it yourself and prove that it can really be a product. You must take that extra step of translating it from an invention into a real product that’s usable," he noted.

“Our role actually in a university, in my opinion, is to not only investigate and discover new things but to somehow deliver them to society at large and to be helpful to society.

As universities, we need to find ways to get that technology out there. We also need to own the IP,” Fossum said.

going to face some stiff and well-funded competition. The two options were either to raise vast sums of capital or to sell to an electronics company with the resources to take the technology to the next level.

How to be a scientist-entrepreneur As basic R&D corporate budgets are shrinking, it has become the norm for big corporations to acquire smaller startups developing market-ready innovative technology. Over the past 15 to 20 years, universities have filled the gap by playing an important role as incubators of future technologies. This means the technology has to be compelling and bring value to the market.

1. Dr. Eric Fossum, a professor at Dartmouth and the inventor of the complementary metaloxide semiconductor (CMOS) active pixel image sensor used in cameras worldwide, speaks during his 2017 Enrichment in the Spring Program lecture on campus.

2. Dr. Eric Fossum (center) receives a gift from the KAUST Enrichment Programs team thanking him for speaking during the 2017 Enrichment in the Spring.

www.kaust.edu.sa

19

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From waste to resource: the future of wastewater treatment

By Caitlin Clark and Pascal Saikaly

The University’s Water Desalination and Reuse Center (WDRC) held the KAUST Research Conference: Changing Paradigms of Wastewater Treatment – From Waste to Resource from March 27 to 29 on the University’s campus, with the event focusing on recent developments in efficient and innovative technologies and microbes to recover resources such as water, nutrients and energy from wastewater in a safe and sustainable manner.

Featuring over 30 speakers from academia and global industry, the conference included presentation sessions and panel discussions that covered several key areas, including: energy efficient biotechnologies for nutrient removal from wastewater; innovative biotechnologies for the recovery of water, energy and nutrients from wastewater; harnessing the potential of microbes for synthesizing high-value added products from carbon dioxide and low-value waste streams; the characterization of microbes to better harness their potential in energy and nutrient removal; and the safety of reuse water, including the characterization of emerging contaminants and the role of wastewater treatment processes to reduce contaminants.

The value in wastewater In his opening remarks, Pascal Saikaly, KAUST associate professor of environmental science and engineering and conference chair, stated, “There is a growing awareness that the current paradigms for wastewater treatment are no longer adequate to meet the demands of a rapidly growing human population and urbanization, the increase in water scarcity in many regions around the world and the need for a more sustainable society. We are now entering a new era in the water management cycle where we think of ‘used waters’ as a valuable resource for water, nutrients, energy and valuable materials such as bioplastics, alginate and metals.”

“Although wastewater treatment focuses on removing water pollutants, many of these pollutants are valuable resources if recovered in useful form,” noted keynote speaker Bruce Rittmann, professor and director of the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. “It is now possible to capture the energy value in ‘used waters,’ including domestic wastewater.”

Rittmann outlined the developments in anaerobic membrane bioreactors used to generate methane and microbial electrochemical technologies used to generate electrical power or hydrogen gas that make it possible to achieve energy-positive wastewater treatment.

“After recovery of the energy used from water, most of the nitrogen and phosphorous are released as inorganic forms that can be recovered for recycling to agriculture,” he said.

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THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

Keynote speaker Bruce Logan, professor of environmental engineering and director of the Engineering Energy & Environmental Institute at Penn State University, highlighted new developments in cathode material for scale up of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) in his talk, noting, “Cathode area per reactor volume is key design parameter for scale up of MFCs. A second process is needed when using MFCs to treat domestic wastewater.”

Logan also outlined recent developments in integrating MFCs with anaerobic fluidized bed membrane bioreactors for water and energy recovery from wastewater.

Jeonghwan Kim, associate professor at the Sustainable, Environmental Membrane Technology (SEMT) Laboratory at Inha University in Korea, emphasized the need for achieving energy positive domestic wastewater treatment in Korea in his talk. Kim presented recent developments in anaerobic fluidized membrane bioreactors for energy recovery and fouling control at both fundamental and pilot-scale studies.

“Partial nitritation/anammox (PN/A) bioprocesses provide a critical opportunity for sustainable water resource recovery,” noted speaker George Wells, the Louis Berger Junior professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University. In his talk, Wells outlined the importance of aggregate architecture on partial nitritation/anammox process performance and stability.

“These are crucial for the development of novel operating and design strategies. Taken together, our results provide evidence of the feasibility of application of PN/A bioprocesses for direct mainstream nitrogen removal, but novel approaches to selectively enrich ammonia oxidizing bacteria and anammox bacteria are essential for the future scaling of mainstream partial nitritation/anammox,” he said.

A changing paradigm “Wastewater treatment technologies are being driven towards a new paradigm due to severe water shortages due to droughts, changing climate conditions, rapid increases in energy costs and ongoing environmental challenges, with trends emerging towards a major transition,” said conference keynote speaker Jurg Keller, the director of the Advanced Water Management Centre at the University of Queensland.

Keller presented some of the key urban water management transitions underway in Australia that are influencing and reflecting global trends for wastewater treatment.

“We need to create ‘water-sensitive cities’ where cities of the future are sustainable, productive, resilient and livable, but different cities have different visions and needs,” he said.

“However, all cities need safe water supplies.”

3

4

5 Speakers at the KAUST Research Conference: Changing Paradigms of Wastewater Treatment – From Waste to Resource included Amy Pruden (1), a professor at Virginia Tech; Bruce Rittmann (2), the director of the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University; Bruce Logan (3), the director of the Engineering Energy & Environmental Institute at Penn State University; Jurg Keller (4), the director of the Advanced Water Management Centre at the University of Queensland; and Wen-Tso Liu (5), a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The future of microalgae Ana Otero, associate professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela, discussed microalgal biotechnology used for wastewater treatment in her conference presentation. This technology has experienced major growth in the last decade due to an increased interest in microalgae.

Otero noted, “Microalgae are now being integrated into the wastewater treatment process as part of the microalgal biorefinery concept. Preliminary results from studies demonstrate the efficacy and versatility of microalgae-based nutrient filtering units to provide tailored solutions for specific industrial effluents. However, further studies must be carried out to fully assess the feasibility of this application.”

Jeremy Guest, an assistant professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, outlined the use of microalgal bioprocesses for nutrient recovery from wastewater in his talk.

“Microalgal treatment systems could significantly advance nutrient recovery from wastewater, but the successful implementation of algae for nutrient recovery requires intensification of algal unit processes and a mechanistic understanding of how engineering design and operational decisions influence treatment system performance and reliability,” he said. “We need to embrace these microalgal technologies, and we hope they will take off soon.”

Insights to better harness the potential of microbes Wen-Tso Liu, professor at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign and a conference keynote speaker, presented recent developments in the anaerobic digester microbiome.

“Understanding the anaerobic digester microbiome is the basis to optimize efforts in water and bioenergy recovery,” he said. “Operation conditions are key factors driving the anaerobic digester microbiome, and combining mass balance with high-throughput sequencing provides a unique approach to better design and optimize the process.”

Daniel Bond, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, provided new insights on the importance of inner and outer membrane cytochromes for higher current production in Geobacter through the use of genome editing and high-resolution secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS) in his talk.

Conference speaker Assistant Professor Orianna Bretschger from the J. Craig Venter Institute outlined the application of various “omic” approaches to understand extracellular electron transfer pathways/genes to and from electrodes in electrogeneic microbial communities present in bioelectrochemical systems.

In his talk, Dr. Mads Albertsen, group leader for the Center for Microbial Communities at Aalborg University (Denmark), said, “Using genome-centric metagenomics, we can now revisit the conventional wisdom and accepted facts and we can discover novel organisms of key importance in biological wastewater treatment. Today, we are retrieving genomes from metagenomes at an increasing pace and continue to uncover new and surprising physiologies—for example, Comammox Nitrospira, which are capable of complete ammonia oxidation.”

Averting the next public health crisis A number of conference speakers discussed the public health component of wastewater treatment and changes and innovations in this field.

Keynote speaker Amy Pruden, a professor at Virginia Tech, highlighted the fact that wastewater is a source of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and antibiotic resistance genes.

Improper treatment and discharge of wastewater can result in dissemination of these emerging contaminants into the environment.

This message was further reiterated by Celia Manaia, an assistant professor at the Portuguese Catholic University.

She noted in her presentation that “antibiotic resistance is considered a major threat to human and animal health worldwide. Environmental reservoirs and human practices are potential enhancers for the propagation of antibiotic resistant bacteria and genes (ARB&ARG). To reduce the risks associated with ARB&ARG in wastewater discharge and reuse, further investigation, policy implantation and the development of technical solutions are required.”

Timothy Julian​, leader of the pathogens and human health research group from Eawag (Switzerland), and KAUST Assistant Professor Peiying Hong, who was also conference co-chair, also presented low-cost technologies that can be used to treat wastewater and mitigate the associated risks arising from emerging contaminants.

Poster prize competition Hong announced the winners of the conference’s poster prize competition, which featured three Ph.D. student winners from KAUST: Hong Cheng (first prize); David Mantilla Calderon (second prize); and Dario Rangel Shaw (third prize).

In his closing remarks, Saikaly summarized the highlights of the conference and noted, “There is not necessarily one solution, and we should continue to think about niche-specific applications for next-generation biological wastewater treatment technologies."

www.kaust.edu.sa

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‫مستقبل الطحالب الدقيقة‬ ‫ناقشت آنا أوتيرو‪ ،‬األستاذ المشارك في جامعة سانتياغو دي كومبوستيال‪ ،‬التقنية‬ ‫الحيوية القائمة على الطحالب الدقيقة المستخدمة في معالجة مياه الصرف‬ ‫الصحي‪ ،‬وذلك في سياق عرضها التقديمي في المؤتمر‪ .‬لقد شهدت هذه التقنية‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫كبيرا في العقد المنصرم بسبب االهتمام المتزايد بالطحالب الدقيقة‪.‬‬ ‫تطورا‬ ‫ً‬ ‫كليا منذ ‪ .2006‬ويجري دمجها‬ ‫وقالت‪" :‬لقد أعيد تصور مجال الطحالب الدقيقة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫حاليا في عملية معالجة مياه الصرف الصحي كجزء من مفهوم التصفية الحيوية‬ ‫باستخدام الطحالب الدقيقة‪.‬‬ ‫وأضافت‪" :‬تبرهن النتائج األولية للدراسات على أن كفاءة وحدات تصفية المواد‬ ‫الغذائية باستخدام الطحالب الدقيقة واإلمكانيات المتعددة التي تمتاز بها هذه‬ ‫ً‬ ‫حلوال مخصصة لقطاعات صناعية محددة‪ ،‬رغم أن هذا ال ينفي‬ ‫الوحدات‪ ،‬تقدم‬ ‫أهمية إجراء المزيد من الدراسات بغية وضع تقييم كامل لجدوى هذا التطبيق"‪.‬‬ ‫وفي سياق كلمته‪ ،‬أعطى جيريمي غيست‪ ،‬وهو أستاذ مساعد من جامعة إيلينوي‬ ‫في أوربانا شامبين‪ ،‬لمحة موجزة عن استخدام العملية الحيوية القائمة على‬ ‫الطحالب الدقيقة السترداد المواد الغذائية من مياه الصرف الصحي‪.‬‬ ‫وقال‪" :‬من شأن أنظمة المعالجة بالطحالب الدقيقة أن تنهض باسترداد المواد‬ ‫الغذائية من مياه الصرف الصحي‪ ،‬ولكن نجاح ذلك مرهون بتكثيف عمليات وحدة‬ ‫الطحالب‪ ،‬وبالتوصل إلى فهم ميكانيكي لتأثير قرارات التصميم والقرارات التشغيلية‬ ‫على أداء نظام المعالجة وموثوقيته‪ .‬ينبغي أن نتبنى تقنيات الطحالب الدقيقة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫قريبا"‪.‬‬ ‫هذه‪ ،‬وكلنا أمل بأنها ستقلع‬

‫تفادي أزمة صحة عامة جديدة‬ ‫ناقش عدد من متحدثي المؤتمر جانب الصحة العامة في معالجة مياه الصرف‬ ‫الصحي‪ ،‬ومستجدات هذا الميدان وما ظهر فيه من ابتكارات‪.‬‬ ‫قالت سيليا مانايا‪ ،‬وهي أستاذ مساعد في الجامعة الكاثوليكية البرتغالية‪" :‬ينبغي‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا‪ .‬فهذه المنهجية مفيدة‬ ‫بمجرد تعقيم المياه‪ ،‬بل بإدارة بيئتها الجرثومية‬ ‫أال نفكر‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫لتشجيع الجراثيم الجيدة والتصدي ألزمة الصحة العامة القادمة"‪.‬‬

‫المعالجة‬ ‫وتحدثت عن مقاومة المضادات الحيوية في مياه الصرف الصحي ُ‬ ‫وكيفية التخفيف من مخاطر ذلك‪ ،‬مشيرة إلى أن "مقاومة المضادات الحيوية تعتبر‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫فضال عن أن المخزونات‬ ‫كبيرا لصحة البشر والحيوانات في العالم بأسره‪،‬‬ ‫تهديدا‬

‫عد من المعززات المحتملة النتشار البكتريا والجينات‬ ‫البيئية والممارسات البشرية تُ ّ‬ ‫بد من إجراء المزيد من األبحاث وتنفيذ السياسات‬ ‫وال‬ ‫المقاومة للمضادات الحيوية‪.‬‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫وإيجاد حلول تقنية إذا ما أردنا تخفيض المخاطر التي تقترن البكتيريا والجينات‬ ‫المقاومة للمضادات الحيوية في تصريف مياه الصرف الصحي وإعادة استخدامها"‪.‬‬

‫ً‬ ‫قائال‪" :‬تعتبر المياه من أهم المواطن المناسبة لدراسة مقاومة‬ ‫وتابعت كالمها‬ ‫تصرف كل دقيقة عدداً‬ ‫المضادات الحيوية‪ .‬فمنشآت معالجة مياه الصرف الصحي ّ‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ضخما من الجينات المقاومة للمضادات الحيوية‪ ،‬ولكننا ال نعرف مصير هذه الجينات‬ ‫على الرغم من إمكانية تحويل بعضها إلى بكتيريا أخرى‪.‬‬

‫ً‬ ‫سبيال لقياس ديناميات مقاومة المضادات الحيوية بحيث يمكننا‬ ‫"ينبغي أن نجد‬ ‫إدراك كل ما يترتب على هذا من عواقب بيئية‪ .‬ويبقى تطهير المياه من أهم‬ ‫استراتيجيات تخفيض انتشار المقاومة الحيوية في الوقت الحالي"‪.‬‬

‫مسابقة أفضل ملصق‬ ‫فاز في مسابقة أفضل ملصق في المؤتمر ثالثة طالب دكتوراه من جامعة الملك‬ ‫عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‪ :‬هونغ شينغ (الجائزة األولى)؛ وديفيد مانتيال كالديرون‬ ‫(الجائزة الثانية)؛ داريو رانغل شاو (الجائزة الثالثة)‪.‬‬ ‫وفي سياق كلمته الختامية‪ ،‬أشار باسكال صيقلي‪ ،‬منظم المؤتمر واألستاذ‬ ‫المشارك في العلوم والهندسة البيئية في جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‬ ‫إلى أن "المؤتمر أظهر لنا‪ ،‬بما تخلله من كلمات وعروض تقديمية‪ ،‬مختلف أوجه‬ ‫ً‬ ‫آفاقا‬ ‫عمليات وتطبيقات معالجة مياه الصرف الصحي‪ .‬فالتقنية الجرثومية تفتح‬ ‫واسعة‪ ،‬وينبغي أن نواصل التفكير بتقنيات خاصة بكل حالة للجيل القادم من‬ ‫معالجة مياه الصرف الصحي"‪.‬‬

‫‪6, 7. Over 30 speakers from academia and global industry‬‬ ‫‪took part in the KAUST Research Conference: Changing‬‬ ‫‪Paradigms of Wastewater Treatment – From Waste to‬‬ ‫‪Resource from March 27 to 29.‬‬

‫‪THE BEACON | JUNE 2017‬‬

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‫من مخلفات إلى موارد‪:‬‬ ‫مستقبل معالجة مياه‬ ‫الصرف الصحي‬ ‫لماذا نعالج مياه الصرف الصحي؟ تشير هيئة المسح الجيولوجي األمريكية إلى‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫كثيرا مع‬ ‫استخداما للمياه‪ ،‬ألنها مترابطة‬ ‫أن "معالجة مياه الصرف الصحي تعتبر‬

‫استخدامات أخرى لها"‪ .‬وينبغي أن تُ عالج المياه التي يستخدمها اإلنسان في‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مجددا‪ ،‬ألن التهاون في هذا‬ ‫الصناعة والمنازل واألعمال قبل تصريفها إلى البيئة‬ ‫قد يؤدي إلى إلحاق أضرار بمواطن الحياة البرية والثروات السمكية وصحة البشر‬ ‫والحيوانات‪ ،‬ناهيك عن تعذر استخدام المياه في االستحمام‪.‬‬ ‫عقد مركز أبحاث تحلية وإعادة استخدام المياه في جامعة الملك عبداهلل‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مؤتمرا بعنوان "تغيير نماذج معالجة مياه الصرف الصحي‪ :‬من‬ ‫للعلوم والتقنية‬ ‫مخلفات إلى موارد"‪ ،‬وذلك من ‪ 27‬إلى ‪ 29‬مارس في الحرم الجامعي‪ .‬وركزت‬ ‫فعاليات المؤتمر على أحدث المستجدات في مجال التقنيات الفعالة والمبتكرة‬ ‫المستخدمة في استرداد الموارد‪ ،‬كالمياه والغذاء والطاقة‪ ،‬من مياه الصرف‬ ‫الصحي على نحو آمن ومستدام‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫متحدثا من القطاعين األكاديمي والصناعي من‬ ‫وشارك في المؤتمر أكثر من ‪30‬‬ ‫مختلف أنحاء العالم‪ ،‬وغطت المحاضرات والعروض التقديمية وحلقات النقاش‬ ‫الموفرة للطاقة المستخدمة‬ ‫عدة مجاالت رئيسية تشمل‪ :‬التقنيات الحيوية الفعالة‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫في استخراج الغذاء من مياه الصرف الصحي؛ والتقنيات الحيوية المبتكرة السترداد‬ ‫المياه والغذاء والطاقة من مياه الصرف الصحي؛ واستغالل قدرة الجراثيم‬ ‫على اصطناع منتجات ذات قيمة مضافة عالية‪ ،‬وذلك من ثاني أكسيد الكربون‬ ‫والمخلفات منخفضة القيمة؛ وتحديد مواصفات الجراثيم الستغالل قدرتها على‬ ‫استخراج الغذاء والطاقة بصورة أفضل؛ وسالمة إعادة استخدام المياه‪ ،‬بما يشمل‬ ‫تحديد مواصفات المواد الملوثة الناشئة‪ ،‬ودور عمليات معالجة مياه الصرف‬ ‫الصحي في تخفيضها‪.‬‬

‫القيمة الموجودة في مياه الصرف الصحي‬ ‫أشار المتحدث الرئيسي البروفيسور بروس ريتمان‪ ،‬مدير مركز سويت للتقنية الحيوية‬ ‫في معهد التصميم البيولوجي في جامعة والية أريزونا‪ ،‬إلى أن "معالجة مياه‬ ‫قيمة‬ ‫الصرف الصحي تركز على إزالة ملوثات المياه‪ ،‬رغم أنها بمعظمها موارد ّ‬ ‫ً‬ ‫حاليا استخالص الطاقة‬ ‫إذا جرى استردادها بصيغة مفيدة‪ .‬فقد بات من الممكن‬

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‫‪www.kaust.edu.sa‬‬

‫الموجودة في ’المياه المستخدمة‘ بما يشمل مياه الصرف الصحي المنزلية"‪.‬‬ ‫وتطرق ريتمان إلى التطورات التي طرأت على مفاعالت الرقاقة الحيوية ذات‬ ‫األغشية الالهوائية المستخدمة في إنتاج الميتان‪ ،‬والخاليا الكهروكيماوية‬ ‫مما يفسح‬ ‫الجرثومية المستخدمة في توليد الطاقة الكهربائية أو غاز الهيدروجين‪ّ ،‬‬ ‫المجال أمام معالجة مياه منتجة للطاقة‪.‬‬ ‫وأضاف‪" :‬بعد استرداد الطاقة من المياه‪ ،‬يجري إطالق معظم النتروجين‬ ‫والفوسفور بصيغ غير عضوية يمكن استردادها وتدويرها في الزراعة"‪.‬‬

‫متغير‬ ‫نموذج‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫قال جورج كيلر‪ ،‬المتحدث الرئيسي في المؤتمر‪ ،‬ومدير مركز اإلدارة المتطورة‬ ‫للمياه في جامعة كوينزالند‪" :‬تتجه تقنيات معالجة مياه الصرف الصحي نحو‬ ‫نموذج جديد بسبب الزيادة المطردة في تكاليف الطاقة والتحديات البيئية‬ ‫المستمرة‪ ،‬إلى جانب اتجاهات ناشئة نحو تحول كبير"‪.‬‬ ‫وعرض كيلر تجربة إدارة المياه في مدن أستراليا‪ ،‬وبعض التحوالت الرئيسية‬ ‫المنتظرة المؤثرة‪ ،‬التي تعكس اتجاهات عالمية في معالجة مياه الصرف الصحي‪.‬‬ ‫وأضاف‪" :‬يجب أن تكون المدن والبلدات أكثر استدامة ومرونة وإنتاجية وصالحية‬ ‫للسكن في المستقبل‪ .‬وعلى الرغم من اختالف الرؤى واالحتياجات باختالف‬ ‫ً‬ ‫’مدنا‬ ‫المدينة‪ ،‬إال أن كافة المدن تحتاج إلى إمداد بالمياه اآلمنة‪ .‬وينبغي أن نبني‬ ‫حساسة للمياه‘ من خالل استخدام أدوات تتيح للمدن االنتقال من وضعها الحالي‬ ‫إلى الوضع المنشود في المستقبل‪ .‬وينبغي تشجيع سكانها على االستثمار في‬ ‫هذه االتجاهات‪ ،‬ألنه ال يقل أهمية عن االستثمار في مجال التقنية"‪.‬‬ ‫وردد آمي برودن‪ ،‬المتحدث في المؤتمر واألستاذ الجامعي من "فيرجينيا تيك"‪،‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫قائال‪" :‬قد تكون معالجة المياه باهظة التكاليف‪ ،‬لذلك ينبغي‬ ‫صدى كالم كيلر‬ ‫في الحالة المثالية أن نسعى إلى تطويرها على نحو يسهم في تخفيض تكاليفها‪،‬‬ ‫وأن نحافظ على االنسجام مع الماء وجهود االستدامة الباقية‪ ،‬عند تصميم أنظمة‬ ‫معالجة مياه الصرف الصحي"‪.‬‬

Visualizing the future of computing

1

By David Murphy Visual computing is the science of sensing, modeling, simulating, processing, understanding, visualizing and displaying all forms of information. Over the past few decades, visual computing has become a key enabling technology for a diverse set of applications spanning scientific discovery, medicine, consumer electronics and entertainment, among others.

At KAUST, the Visual Computing Center (VCC) draws its expertise from a pool of disciplines, including computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and applied mathematics. The center utilizes a range of application domains to tackle problems of unique importance to the Kingdom and create commercial opportunities in the form of startup companies as well as patents and licensing agreements.

The VCC shared its interdisciplinary approach to device development, image and video understanding, semantic analysis, geometric modeling, simulation and visualization with global partners and colleagues at the recent on campus Visual Computing (KAUST RC-VC) – Modeling and Reconstruction conference.

The conference, which was held from April 10 to 12, brought visual computing experts together from both KAUST and abroad and industry representatives with the intention of focusing on computer graphics—specifically on topics centered on geometry and simulation.

A global and local outlook In his opening remarks, Wolfgang Heidrich, director of the VCC, described his center’s research thrust and how its vision fits with the University’s overall mission and values; he also welcomed the overseas conference attendees to the University.

“KAUST is striving to be a destination for researchers and research—people come here because of what is going on in science and education. KAUST is a globally oriented research university, but we are also trying to kick-start the local industry.

From the center's point of view, we also look at startups, of which FalconViz is one of the most successful and most mature,” he said.

“KAUST is a very different place to come to conferences and we are very excited to see the work you are all going to present,” Heidrich added.

‘Equilibrium is a geometric statement’ The first keynote presentation of the conference was by Matthieu Desbrun, professor of computing and mathematical sciences, Caltech. Desbrun’s presentation was on the power of primal/dual meshes for modeling and animation, in which he discussed the notion of orthogonal dual diagrams by displaying a series of recent works that explored the full space of orthogonal primal/dual meshes.

24

THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

Desbrun also covered a range of real-world applications varying from point sampling and fluid dynamics to barycentric coordinates and self-supporting masonry.

“Voronoi diagrams have been the basis for lots of computer programs and meshes in the past,” he noted. “Equilibrium is a geometric statement—it is a well-studied problem, yet no full characterization of solutions is available. Simple geometry principles can have so many applications."

We were really excited to host this research conference. Our students, faculty and staff benefited from many fruitful discussions with the invited participants from academia and industry. We are particularly happy about the high caliber of external researchers who attended the conference, and we believe the conference will be a starting point for productive collaborations in the future."

- Peter Wonka, associate director of the KAUST Visual Computing Center

A continuous interpolation Paul Kry, associate professor at McGill University, presented his work exploring the trade-off between high-fidelity motion and interactive simulation rates for physically based simulation of contact, deformation and articulated structures. Kry also covered examples such as numerical coarsening of elastic solids, discretization of contact at arbitrary resolutions and reduced models for compliant structures.

“Contact-deformation articulated structures are important for training, games, movies and simulation. However, there are also some important limitations with embedded meshes. We can use the arbitrary resolution to deal with the contact problem,” Kry said.

1. Computer scientist Ibrahim Alhashim from Simon Fraser University speaks about networking to pology and shape matching and modeling at the KAUST Visual Computing – Modeling and Reconstruction conference.

2. Roland Ruiters, a senior researcher with Autodesk,

discusses data-driven interpolation of optical properties at the conference.

3. Justin Solomon, an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, gives a conference presentation. Photos by Meres J. Weche.

2

Another invited international attendee, a computer scientist and Saudi native Ibrahim Alhashim from Simon Fraser University, spoke about networking topology and specifically shape matching and modeling. Alhashim, a recipient of the 2015 Alain Fournier Ph.D. Dissertation Award, said, “3-D modeling is hard— you need to recombine or shuffle the different parts from shapes.”

“In our work, adding continuous blending produces richer varieties.

Novel and inspiring designs come up from having blended shapes. We need to find a continuous interpolation of two manmade 3-D shapes,” Alhashim added.

In the final presentation of the day, Justin Solomon, assistant professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and one of Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30: Science, spoke about the geometric problems that occur in computer graphics, vision and machine learning. In his opening remarks, Solomon said, “Geometry in the application implies geometry in the computational problem. Information that spreads out a little faster still doesn't fix this problem.”

He went on to describe new methods for problems arising in shape analysis/correspondence, flows on graphs and surface parameterization.

A world full of complex materials Day two of KAUST RC-VC opened with a keynote lecture by Kavita Bala, professor in computer science, Cornell University and editor-in-chief of Transactions on Graphics (TOG). Bala’s Lightcuts research is the core production rendering engine in Autodesk's cloud renderer; her research on instance recognition is the core technology of GrokStyle's visual search engine, and her work on 3-D mandalas was featured at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.

“We are drowning in images. Everyone has a cell phone and is attempting to capture the world. Wouldn't it be great to capture these real-world images and use them to better understand the world around us? I love problems that I don't understand—that's what research is all about,” she said.

In her keynote entitled “Materials in the Wild,” she spoke about how in our daily lives we are brought into contact with a wealth of materials that contribute to both the utility and aesthetics of our environment. Bala also described the differences between human and machine perception of materials and their appearance.

3

"A lot of effort has gone into computer technology and material recognition. We trained our program to realize the object coming in and classify it accordingly. Through deep feature interpolation, we can produce a realistic interpretation of an image in three minutes," she continued. "Humans are good at disambiguating; we can recognize an object, but can the computer system recognize it?”

‘Some materials remain challenging' During the afternoon sessions, Roland Ruiters, a senior researcher with Autodesk, discussed the data-driven interpolation of optical properties. His talk was based on his work during his postdoctoral studies at the Institute of Computer Science II at the University of Bonn.

“One of the challenges of the data-driven approach is that you have to take a lot of measurements. Editing can also be difficult due to the high complexity of the data sets —measurements are also costly. We would like to create novel materials that can be used at a different date,” Ruiters said.

“We interpolate neighborhoods instead of whole images. Through our work, we create interpolated materials. Data-driven material representations can be used to get high-quality renderings for a wide range of materials. However, some materials remain challenging—there are large data sizes and long computation times and we need more intuitive user interfaces,” he concluded.

A high-caliber conference The third and final day of the conference was a mix of presentations, industrial symposiums and an open house at the VCC. The open house, which was sponsored by the KAUST Industry Collaboration Program (KICP), featured demonstrations and exhibitions from the VCC, the KAUST Visualization Lab and local industry partners.

"We were really excited to host this research conference. Our students, faculty and staff benefited from many fruitful discussions with the invited participants from academia and industry. We are particularly happy about the high caliber of external researchers who attended the conference, and we believe the conference will be a starting point for productive collaborations in the future," said Peter Wonka, associate director of the VCC.

“When I talk about the 'wild' I'm not talking about the jungle—I'm talking about studies outside of the laboratory in a real-world environment. One of the objectives when we do this kind of modelling is to make the virtual representation of an item(s) indistinguishable from the real item(s)," Bala said.

www.kaust.edu.sa

25

‫‪4. Matthieu Desbrun, a professor of computing and‬‬ ‫‪mathematical sciences at Caltech, gives the first keynote‬‬ ‫– ‪presentation at the KAUST Visual Computing‬‬ ‫‪Modeling and Reconstruction conference.‬‬ ‫‪5. Kavita Bala, a professor of computer science at Cornell‬‬ ‫‪University, speaks to attendees at the KAUST Visual‬‬ ‫‪Computing conference. Photo by Meres J. Weche.‬‬

‫وأضاف الهاشم‪" :‬في عملنا‪ ،‬تثمر إضافة التوليف المستمر عن أنواع أغنى‪ .‬وتخرج‬ ‫التصاميم الجديدة والملهمة من وضع أشكال جرى توليفها‪ .‬وينبغي أن نجد‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مستمرا لشكلين ثالثيي األبعاد من صنع اإلنسان"‪.‬‬ ‫استيفاء‬ ‫ً‬ ‫وفي العرض التقديمي األخير في ذلك اليوم‪ ،‬تحدث جاستن سولومون‪ ،‬األستاذ‬ ‫المساعد في قسم الهندسة الكهربائية وعلوم الحاسب اآللي في معهد‬ ‫ماساتشوستس للتقنية‪ ،‬وأحد الذين اختارتهم مجلة فوربس في قائمتها (ثالثون‬ ‫تحت الثالثين) (‪ ،)Under 30 30‬عن المشاكل الهندسية التي تحدث في الرسوم‬ ‫البيانية الحاسوبية وفي الرؤية والتعلم من اآللة‪ .‬وقال في كلمته االفتتاحية‪:‬‬ ‫"يستلزم استخدام الهندسة في التطبيقات استخدامها في المسألة الحسابية‪ .‬فما‬ ‫زالت المعلومات التي تنتشر بسرعة أكبر بقليل عاجزة عن ّ‬ ‫حل هذه المشكلة"‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫شارحا المنهجيات الجديدة للمشاكل التي تظهر في تحليل‪ /‬تجانس‬ ‫وواصل كالمه‬ ‫الشكل وتدفقاته على الرسوم البيانية ووصف المساحة بالحدود‪.‬‬

‫عالم مليء بالمواد المعقدة‬ ‫افتتح اليوم الثاني من مؤتمر أبحاث الحوسبة المرئية بمحاضرة رئيسية من كافيتا‬ ‫باال‪ ،‬أستاذة علوم الحاسب اآللي في جامعة كورنيل ورئيس تحرير (‪Transactions‬‬ ‫‪ .)on Graphics‬وتمثل أبحاث باال في قطع الضوء (‪ )lightcuts‬محرك تصيير اإلنتاج‬ ‫صير سحابة أوتوديسك؛ وتمثل أبحاث باال في مجال التعرف‬ ‫الجوهري في ُم ّ‬ ‫المباشر التقنية الجوهرية لمحرك البحث المرئي غروكستايل (‪)GrokStyle‬؛ كما‬ ‫عرضت أعمالها في مجال أشكال المانادال ثالثية األبعاد في معرض روبين للفنون‬ ‫في نيويورك‪.‬‬ ‫البرية" كيف أن‬ ‫وتحدثت في سياق كلمتها الرئيسية التي عنوانها "المواد في ّ‬ ‫حياتنا اليومية أصبحت على تماس مع مجموعة كبيرة من المواد التي تسهم في‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا الفروقات بين التصور البشري وتصور اآللة‬ ‫منفعة بيئتنا وجمالها‪ .‬ووصفت باال‬ ‫للمواد ومظهرها‪.‬‬ ‫وقالت باال‪" :‬نحن نعيش في عالم ثري ً‬ ‫جدا مليء بالمواد المعقدة‪ .‬وهدفنا هو‬ ‫إدراك كيفية عمل هذه المواد‪ .‬لقد واظبت مجموعتي على العمل على الصور‬ ‫التي تركز على الواقع‪ .‬فكثير من العمل الذي نقوم به يركز على الجانب الفيزيائي‪،‬‬ ‫وعلى كيفية تصور البشر لمحيطهم"‪.‬‬

‫والتعرف على المواد‪ .‬لقد دربنا برنامجنا على إدراك األجسام الداخلة وتصنيفها‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أصوال‪ .‬ومن خالل االستيفاء العميق للمالمح‪ ،‬يمكننا إنتاج تفسير واقعي لصورة ما‬ ‫في غضون ثالث دقائق‪ .‬فالبشر بارعون في إزالة االلتباس‪ ،‬ويمكننا التعرف على‬ ‫جسم ما ولكن هل يستطيع نظام الحاسب اآللي التعرف عليه؟"‪.‬‬ ‫وقالت‪" :‬نحن نغرق في الصور‪ .‬الجميع لديهم هواتف متحركة ويحاولون تصوير‬ ‫ً‬ ‫رائعا لو أخذنا صور العالم الواقعي هذه واستخدمناها‬ ‫العالم من حولهم‪ .‬ألن يكون‬ ‫في فهم العالم المحيط بنا بصورة أفضل – أنا أحب المسائل التي ال أفهمها‪ ،‬فذلك‬ ‫هو جوهر األبحاث"‪.‬‬

‫"بعض المواد تبقى صعبة"‬ ‫وأثناء الجلسات المسائية‪ ،‬ناقش رونالد رويترز‪ ،‬وهو باحث أول في أوتوديسك‪،‬‬ ‫استيفاء الخواص البصرية القائم على البيانات‪ .‬وكانت كلمته تستند إلى عمله أثناء‬ ‫دراسات ما بعد الدكتوراه في المعهد الثاني لعلوم الحاسب اآللي في جامعة‬ ‫بون‪.‬‬ ‫قال رويترز‪" :‬من التحديات التي تفرضها المنهجية القائمة على البيانات أنك يجب‬ ‫ً‬ ‫صعبا بسبب التعقيد الكبير‬ ‫أن تجري الكثير من القياسات‪ .‬وقد يكون التحرير‬ ‫لمجموعات البيانات‪ ،‬ناهيك عن التكلفة العالية للقياسات‪ .‬ولذلك‪ ،‬فنحن نسعى‬ ‫الستحداث مواد جديدة يمكن استخدامها بتاريخ مختلف"‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫عوضا عن الصور بأكملها‪ .‬ومن خالل‬ ‫قائال‪" :‬نحن نستوفي الجوار‬ ‫واختتم كالمه‬ ‫ً‬ ‫موادا مستوفاة‪ .‬ويمكن استخدام تمثيالت المواد القائمة على‬ ‫عملنا‪ ،‬نستحدث‬ ‫البيانات في الحصول على تصوير عالي الجودة لمجموعة كبيرة من المواد‪ .‬ولكن‬ ‫ً‬ ‫فضال‬ ‫بعض المواد تبقى صعبة‪ .‬ويوجد حجوم بيانات ضخمة وأزمان حساب طويلة‪،‬‬ ‫عن أننا بحاجة إلى واجهات مستخدم أبسط"‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مزيجا من العروض التقديمية والمنتديات‬ ‫شهد اليوم الثالث واألخير من المؤتمر‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫وتخلل اليوم المفتوح الذي‬ ‫مفتوحا في مركز الحوسبة المرئية‪.‬‬ ‫ويوما‬ ‫الصناعية‬ ‫رعاه برنامج التعاون الصناعي في جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية بيانات‬ ‫علمية ومعارض من مركز الحوسبة المرئية ومختبر التصوير العلمي في جامعة‬ ‫الملك عبداهلل ومن القطاع الصناعي المحلي‪.‬‬

‫’البرية‘‪ ،‬فأنا ال أتحدث عن الغابة‪ ،‬بل أتحدث عن دراسات‬ ‫وأضافت‪" :‬عندما أتحدث عن‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫عد إنجاز التمثيل االفتراضي لبنود ال‬ ‫خارج المختبر‪ ،‬في بيئة العالم الحقيقي‪ُ .‬‬ ‫وي ّ‬ ‫يمكن تمييزها عن البنود الحقيقية من األهداف التي نسعى لتحقيقها عند قيامنا‬ ‫بهذا النوع من النمذجة‪ .‬ونصرف الكثير من الجهد على تقنيات الحاسب اآللي‬

‫‪THE BEACON | JUNE 2017‬‬

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‫‪5‬‬

‫‪4‬‬

‫تصوير مستقبل الحوسبة‬ ‫يمكن تعريف الحوسبة المرئية بأنها علم تحسس كافة أشكال المعلومات المرئية‬ ‫ونمذجتها ومحاكاتها ومعالجتها وفهمها وتصويرها وعرضها‪ .‬لقد أصبحت‬ ‫الحوسبة المرئية خالل العقود القليلة الماضية تقنية ُممكنّ ة رئيسية لمجموعة‬ ‫متنوعة من التطبيقات كاالكتشاف العلمي والطب وإلكترونيات المستهلك‬ ‫والتسلية والترفيه على سبيل المثال ال الحصر‪.‬‬ ‫ويستقي مركز الحوسبة المرئية في جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية خبراته‬ ‫من مجموعة متعددة من االختصاصات تشمل علوم الحاسب اآللي والهندسة‬ ‫الكهربائية والميكانيكية والرياضيات التطبيقية‪ .‬ويستغل مجموعة من مجاالت‬ ‫التطبيق بهدف التصدي لمشاكل ذات أهمية فريدة بالنسبة للمملكة‪ ،‬واستحداث‬ ‫فرص تجارية تتخذ شكل مشاريع ناشئة‪ ،‬ناهيك عن براءات االختراع واتفاقيات‬ ‫االمتياز‪.‬‬ ‫وشارك مركز الحوسبة المرئية منهجيته متعددة االختصاصات في تطوير األجهزة‬ ‫وفهم الصور والفيديو والتحليل الداللي والنمذجة الهندسية والمحاكاة والتصوير‬ ‫العلمي مع شركاء وزمالء عالميين في مؤتمر "النمذجة وإعادة البناء" الذي ُعقد‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مؤخرا في الحرم الجامعي في جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‪.‬‬ ‫وجمع المؤتمر‪ ،‬الذي عقد من ‪ 10‬إلى ‪ 12‬أبريل‪ ،‬خبراء في الحوسبة المرئية من‬ ‫جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية ومن الخارج‪ ،‬إلى جانب ممثلين عن الصناعة‪،‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫وتحديدا على مواضيع تركز‬ ‫وذلك بهدف التركيز على الرسوم البيانية الحاسوبية‪،‬‬ ‫على الهندسة والمحاكاة‪.‬‬

‫نظرة مستقبلية محلية وعالمية‬ ‫وفي كلمته االفتتاحية‪ ،‬وصف ولفغانغ هايدريتش‪ ،‬مدير مركز الحوسبة المرئية‪،‬‬ ‫القوة الدافعة ألبحاث مركزه وكيف تنسجم وتتالءم رؤيته مع قيم الجامعة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا بحضور المؤتمر الذين قدموا إلى الجامعة من‬ ‫ومهمتها اإلجمالية؛ ورحب‬ ‫مختلف أنحاء العالم‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مقصدا للباحثين‬ ‫وقال‪" :‬تسعى جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية ألن تكون‬ ‫واألبحاث‪ ،‬فالجميع يقصدون الجامعة من أجل ما تقدمه من أبحاث وتعليم‪.‬‬ ‫ورغم أن جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية جامعة أبحاث ذات توجه عالمي‪،‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا أن المشاريع‬ ‫أيضا إلطالق شرارة الصناعة المحلية‪ .‬ويرى المركز‬ ‫ولكننا نسعى‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ونضجا"‪.‬‬ ‫نجاحا‬ ‫الناشئة مثل فالكون فيز (‪ )FalconViz‬من أكثر المشاريع‬

‫‪27‬‬

‫‪www.kaust.edu.sa‬‬

‫وأضاف هايدريتش‪" :‬جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية مكان مميز ً‬ ‫جدا في‬ ‫تنظيم المؤتمرات العلمية‪ ،‬ويحدونا حماس كبير لإلطالع على األعمال التي‬ ‫ستعرضونها"‪.‬‬

‫’االستقرار هو عبارة هندسية‘‬ ‫كان العرض التقديمي الذي قدمه ماثيو ديسبرون‪ ،‬أستاذ الحوسبة والعلوم‬ ‫الرياضية في "كالتيك"‪ ،‬أول عرض تقديمي رئيسي في المؤتمر‪ .‬وكان يدور عن‬ ‫أهمية الشبكات األولية‪ /‬الثنائية في النمذجة وإعداد الصور المتحركة‪ ،‬وناقش‬ ‫فيه مفهوم المخططات المتعامدة الثنائية من خالل عرض سلسلة من األعمال‬ ‫األخيرة التي تناولت مجمل فضاء الشبكات المتعامدة األولية‪ /‬الثنائية‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا مجموعة من تطبيقات العالم الواقعي كأخذ العينات‬ ‫كما غطى ديسبرون‬ ‫النقطية وديناميات الجريان واإلحداثيات الكتلية والبناء ذاتي الدعم على سبيل‬ ‫المثال ال الحصر‪.‬‬ ‫وقال ديسبورن‪" :‬كانت مخططات فوروني تمثل األساس لكثير من برامج‬ ‫الحاسوب والشبكات في الماضي"‪ .‬وأضاف‪" :‬االستقرار عبارة هندسية‪ ،‬وهو‬ ‫ً‬ ‫جيدا‪ ،‬ومع ذلك‪ ،‬فالتوصيف الكامل للحلول غير متوفر بعد‪.‬‬ ‫مسألة جرت دراستها‬ ‫ويمكن أن يكون لمبادىء الهندسة البسيطة تطبيقات كثيرة"‪.‬‬

‫استيفاء متواصل‬ ‫وفي الفترة الثانية‪ ،‬عرض بول كراي‪ ،‬األستاذ المشارك في جامعة مكغيل‪ ،‬عمله‬ ‫الذي يبحث في المفاضلة بين الحركة عالية الدقة وسرعات المحاكاة التفاعلية‬ ‫المستخدمة في محاكاة التالمس والتشوه والهياكل الممفصلة‪.‬‬ ‫وقال كراي‪" :‬يمتاز التماس والتشوه والهياكل الممفصلة بأهمية كبيرة في‬ ‫التدريب واأللعاب واألفالم السينمائية والمحاكاة‪ ،‬على الرغم من وجود بعض‬ ‫تحد من فعالية الشبكات المدمجة‪ .‬ولكننا نستطيع استخدام‬ ‫القيود الهامة التي ّ‬ ‫دقة العرض االنسيابية للتعامل مع مشكلة التماس"‪.‬‬ ‫وتحدث إبراهيم الهاشم‪ ،‬أحد المدعوين الدوليين اآلخرين وهو عالم حاسب‬ ‫آلي سعودي في جامعة سيمون فريزر‪ ،‬عن الشكل الهندسي للشبكات‪ ،‬وعن‬ ‫ً‬ ‫تحديدا‪ .‬وقال الهاشم‪ ،‬الحاصل على جائزة آالن فورنيه‬ ‫مطابقة األشكال والنمذجة‬ ‫ألطروحة شهادة الدكتوراه ‪" :2015‬النمذجة ثالثية األبعاد صعبة‪ ،‬وينبغي أن تعيد‬ ‫جمع أو خلط أجزاء األشكال المختلفة"‪.‬‬

KAUST draws a crowd

1

By Michelle Ponto With nearly 19,000 attendees, the 253rd American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting and Exposition held from April 2 to 4 in San Francisco surpassed all previous attendance records.

KAUST too exceeded all previous records with an action-packed plan of activities, speaking engagements, live video and more at the event, which resulted in nearly 600 people registering at the University's ACS booth and expressing an interest in learning about KAUST.

An example of the Core Labs in action is the recent high-quality sequence of the Chenopodium quinoa genome. The Analytical Chemistry Core Lab developed the method to quantify the contents of saponins in quinoa seeds. The Imaging and Characterization Core Lab generated images for the research and the Greenhouse Core Lab provided plant care. It’s the combination of talent, passion and equipment that made the research possible.

ACS San Francisco brought together the talents of a number of departments across the University, including the Physical Science and Engineering Division (PSE), the Core Labs, Human Resources, Marketing Communications and the Visiting Student Research Program (VSRP).

There are currently a number of open positions in the labs, including: Analytical Chemist, Chromatography & Mass Spec.

Team Lead and Physical Characterization Scientist.

This diverse multi-department combination made up of over a dozen students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty and staff created an ideal atmosphere and boosted interaction with attendees.

With the University's top ranking globally in citations per faculty, visitors to the booth were already aware of the University’s reputation for research excellence.

Fellowships and visiting research students

Professor Mohamed Eddaoudi, the Chemical Science program chair at KAUST, is well-known in the chemistry community.

He is regarded as a world leader in the field of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and many students dropped by the booth hoping to see or speak with him.

ACS San Francisco kicked off with a Graduate Fair that took place on April 2 from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Over 150 undergraduates signed up to learn more about the VSRP and even more stopped by to inquire about KAUST, including representatives from other schools in attendance at the event.

A high percentage of ACS attendees are students, so it’s no surprise that the University's fully funded fellowships and the VSRP caused the biggest stir. The VSRP paid internship program is for students who are finishing a bachelor's or master's degree and are looking for the chance to work on an active research project in their field.

Seeking research and lab talent In addition to future graduate students, ACS also attracts talented lab technicians and researchers who may be interested in working in the University’s high-tech labs.

The KAUST Core Labs consist of 10 laboratories ranging from Analytical Chemistry to Imaging and Characterization to Supercomputing. These labs are used by the KAUST research community, collaborators and industry partners and are the heart that keeps research pumping at the University.

28

THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

The future is bright

Overall, the KAUST team was impressed with turnout this year to ACS San Francisco and the University is already starting to plan for the Fall 2017 ACS event in Washington, D.C.

The University's Core Labs were an important part of the KAUST booth at the 2017 American Chemical Society conference in San Francisco in April. Scan here to watch a video about these exciting facilities on campus.

Scan here to watch a video of KAUST Ph.D. student and ACS conference participant Ahmed Balawi discuss how his Visiting Student Research Program (VSRP) experience changed his research career.

‫‪1. A delegation from KAUST attended‬‬ ‫‪the 2017 ACS conference in San‬‬ ‫‪Francisco, California, to speak to‬‬ ‫‪students and professionals about‬‬ ‫‪opportunities at the University.‬‬

‫‪2. KAUST staff member Mohamed Matar‬‬ ‫‪interacts with visitors to the KAUST‬‬ ‫‪booth during the 2017 ACS conference‬‬ ‫‪in San Francisco.‬‬

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‫جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫كبيرا‬ ‫إقباال‬ ‫والتقنية تشهد‬ ‫ً‬ ‫رقما‬ ‫حقق المؤتمر والمعرض الوطني الـ ‪ 253‬للجمعية الكيميائية األمريكية‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مشاركا‪ .‬وإلى ذلك‪ ،‬فقد‬ ‫قياسيا بعدد الحاضرين وصل إلى حوالي ‪ 19‬آالف‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا جميع األرقام السابقة بفضل‬ ‫حطمت جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‬ ‫خطة حافلة باإلثارة‪ ،‬اشتملت على مشاركة في إلقاء الكلمات وبث مباشر وغير‬ ‫ذلك من األنشطة‪ .‬وبلغ عدد المسجلين في جناح الجامعة نحو ‪ 600‬شخص أعربوا‬ ‫عن اهتمامهم باالطالع على العروض المختلفة التي تقدمها الجامعة‪.‬‬ ‫ومن الجدير بالذكر أن مؤتمر الجمعية الكيميائية األمريكية‪ ،‬الذي ُعقد في سان‬ ‫ً‬ ‫عددا من المواهب من عدة أقسام في‬ ‫فرانسيسكو ما بين ‪ 2‬و‪ 4‬أبريل‪ ،‬قد جمع‬ ‫الجامعة‪ ،‬ومنها قسم العلوم والهندسة الفيزيائية والمختبرات األساسية والموارد‬ ‫البشرية وفريق العالقات العامة واإلعالم وبرنامج أبحاث الطلبة الزائرين‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫وباحثا ما بعد‬ ‫طالبا‬ ‫لقد خلقت هذه المجموعة المتنوعة‪ ،‬التي تضم أكثر من ‪12‬‬ ‫وموظفا من عدة أقسام في الجامعة‪ ،‬جواً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫وعضوا في هيئة التدريس‬ ‫الدكتوراه‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مثاليا‪ ،‬وأسهمت في تعزيز التفاعل مع الحضور‪.‬‬

‫الزمالة وطلبة األبحاث الزائرون‬ ‫انطلق مؤتمر الجمعية الكيميائية األمريكية في سان فرانسيسكو بمعرض للخريجين‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مساء‪ .‬وسجل‬ ‫ظهرا حتى الساعة الخامسة‬ ‫أقيم في ‪ 2‬أبريل من الساعة الواحدة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫طالبا الدخول بهدف االطالع على برنامج أبحاث الطلبة الزائرين‪،‬‬ ‫أكثر من ‪150‬‬ ‫كما توقف عدد أكبر لالستعالم عن جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‪ ،‬ومنهم‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا‪.‬‬ ‫مؤسسات تعليمية أخرى مشاركة‬ ‫[يرجى إضافة فيديو الطالب ‪]https://vimeo.com/209563404‬‬ ‫كان الطلبة يمثلون نسبة عالية من الحضور في مؤتمر الجمعية الكيميائية‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مفاجئا أن تستقطب زمالة الجامعة الممولة بالكامل وبرنامج‬ ‫األمريكية‪ ،‬ولم يكن‬ ‫أبحاث الطلبة الزائرين اإلقبال األكبر‪ .‬ويشار إلى أن برنامج التدريب العملي مدفوع‬ ‫األجور مخصص للطلبة الذين يكملون درجة البكالوريوس أو الماجستير الباحثين عن‬ ‫فرصة العمل في مشروع أبحاث نشط في مجال اختصاصهم‪.‬‬

‫البحث عن مواهب في مجال األبحاث والمختبرات‬ ‫ً‬ ‫فضال عن الطلبة الذين سيتخرجون في المستقبل‪ ،‬يستقطب مؤتمر الجمعية‬ ‫الكيميائية األمريكية باحثين وفنيي مختبرات موهوبين قد يهتمون بالعمل في‬ ‫مختبرات الجامعة عالية التقنية‪.‬‬

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‫وتضم جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية عشرة مختبرات أساسية‪ ،‬كمختبر‬ ‫الكيمياء التحليلية ومختبر التصوير والتوصيف ومختبر الحوسبة الفائقة‪ .‬وتمثل هذه‬ ‫المختبرات‪ ،‬التي يستخدمها مجتمع الجامعة وشركاؤها في القطاع الصناعي‪ ،‬قلب‬ ‫الجامعة الذي يدعم األبحاث ويحافظ على استمرارها‪.‬‬ ‫[إضافة فيديو المختبرات األساسية ‪https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlA‬‬ ‫‪]N0C0LKq4&feature=youtu.be‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مثاال على تضافر الجهود‬ ‫مؤخرا‬ ‫ويعد وضع التسلسل عالي الجودة لجينوم الكينوا‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫بين المختبرات األساسية‪ ،‬إذ عمل مختبر الكيمياء التحليلية على تطوير طريقة‬ ‫الصابونين في البذور‪ ،‬وأسهم مختبر التصوير والتوصيف في إنتاج‬ ‫تكميم محتويات‬ ‫ُ‬ ‫صور لألبحاث‪ ،‬وتكفل مختبر المستنبتات الزجاجية برعاية النباتات‪ .‬وما كان لهذه‬ ‫األبحاث أن ترى النور لوال تضافر المواهب والشغف والمعدات‪[ .‬رابط للمقالة]‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫حاليا عدد من المناصب الشاغرة التي تشتمل على‪ :‬كيميائي‬ ‫ويوجد في المختبر‬ ‫تحليلي‪ ،‬وقائد فريق للفصل الكروماتوغرافي والفصل الكتلي وعالم توصيف‬ ‫فيزيائي‪.‬‬

‫المستقبل مشرق‬ ‫لقد كان زوار الجناح على معرفة مسبقة بالسمعة الممتازة التي تتمتع بها جامعة‬ ‫الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية في إنجاز أبحاث عالية الجودة‪ ،‬وذلك إثر احتاللها‬ ‫المركز األول في عدد مرات االستشهاد بأبحاث هيئة التدريس‪.‬‬ ‫عرج عدد كبير من الطالب على جناح الجامعة للقاء البروفيسور‬ ‫وإلى ذلك‪ ،‬فقد ّ‬ ‫محمد الداوودي والتحدث معه‪.‬‬ ‫يذكر أن الداوودي يشغل منصب رئيس برنامج العلوم الكيميائية في جامعة الملك‬ ‫ً‬ ‫جيدا في أوساط المجتمع الكيميائي‪،‬‬ ‫عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‪ ،‬وهو معروف‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫عالميا في مجال األطر المعدنية العضوية‪.‬‬ ‫رائدا‬ ‫ويعتبر‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫ً‬ ‫جيدا عن اإلقبال هذا العام على مؤتمر الجمعية‬ ‫انطباعا‬ ‫كون الفريق‬ ‫إجماال‪ّ ،‬‬ ‫الكيميائية األمريكية في سان فرانسيسكو‪ ،‬وقد شرع منذ اآلن بالتخطيط لمؤتمر‬ ‫الخريف المزمع عقده في واشنطن‪.‬‬

KAUST and Thermo Fisher Scientific open Center of Excellence KAUST and Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. held an opening ceremony on May 9 for the Electron Microscopy Center of Excellence at KAUST. The new Center builds upon the longstanding partnership between KAUST and Thermo Fisher and will focus on excellence in instrument performance and R&D collaboration.

The Center aims to offer KAUST scientists and collaborators exploration and experimentation capabilities through Thermo Fisher’s leading electron microscopy platform. Industry partners located in the KAUST Research and Technology Park will also benefit from proximity to Thermo Fisher’s deep application knowledge in materials science.

The Center’s opening ceremony included the official commissioning of the FEI Titan Themis Z scanning transmission electron microscope (S/TEM), the most advanced analytical transmission electron microscope commercially available to date and the first to be installed in the world. Materials scientists use the Titan Themis Z to understand relationships between a material’s larger-scale physical properties and its atomicscale composition and structure. This system joins other highly advanced electron microscopy systems already installed at the Center, including a total of 16 electron microscopes from Thermo Fisher.

“We have enjoyed a long history with KAUST and look forward to continued collaboration and technology advancement as part of this new Center of Excellence,” said Michael Shafer, president of materials and structural analysis at Thermo Fisher.

“By gaining access to the latest characterization techniques, hardware and software available on the market, KAUST will have the opportunity to advance scientific research in the areas of chemistry and catalyst research, nanoparticles and life sciences.”

1

“This Center embodies the mission of our strategic partnership with Thermo Fisher to achieve our common goals in the advancement of high-performance imaging technologies," said Dr. Justin Mynar, director of the KAUST Core Laboratories and Major Facilities. "Our collaboration seeks to elevate the experimental capabilities and capacity in the Electron Microscopy Center of Excellence to provide our students, faculty, researchers and partners an array of scientific opportunities and advantages for the first time in Saudi Arabia."

The Center of Excellence is the first implementation in a strategy

by KAUST to build longterm partnerships with major instrument suppliers. It will serve as a model for future opportunities to provide state-of-the-art research facilities, training and services to KAUST users and collaborators across Saudi Arabia.

1. The official commissioning of the University's

Titan Themis Z scanning transmission electron microscope was part of the opening ceremony for the KAUST Electron Microscopy Center of Excellence on May 9. The microscope, located in the KAUST Core Labs, is the most advanced analytical transmission electron microscope commercially available to date and is the first to be installed in the world.

Photo by Basil Chew.

2. Pictured (from left to right) at the opening of

the University's Electron Microscopy Center of Excellence: Kun Li, KAUST director of the Imaging and Characterization Core Lab; Jean Frechet, KAUST vice president for research; Jean-Lou Chameau, KAUST president; Justin Mynar, KAUST director of the Core Laboratories and Major Facilities; Trisha Rice, Thermo Fisher vice president, general manager, materials science; Mark Massey, Thermo Fisher senior director sales, materials science; Marc Peeters, Thermo Fisher vice president, sales and business development, materials science; and Tristan Walker, KAUST acting vice president of Innovation and Economic Development. Photo by Ginger Lisanti.

3. Justin Mynar (left), KAUST director of the Core

Laboratories and Major Facilities, and Trisha Rice, Thermo Fisher vice president, general manager, materials science, unveil the Electron Microscopy Center of Excellence plaque at the official opening on May 9. Photo by Ginger Lisanti.

30

THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

‫‪3‬‬ ‫‪2‬‬

‫جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية وشركة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫للتميز‬ ‫مركزا‬ ‫ثيرمو فيشر ساينتيفيك تفتتحان‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫في الفحص المجهري اإللكتروني‬ ‫افتتحت جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‪ ،‬باالشتراك مع شركة ثيرمو فيشر‬ ‫التميز في الفحص المجهري‬ ‫ساينتيفيك (‪ ،).Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc‬مركز‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫اإللكتروني‪ ،‬وذلك في ‪ 9‬مايو في حرم الجامعة‪ .‬ويستند المركز الجديد إلى الشراكة‬ ‫التميز في أداء المعدات الدقيقة‬ ‫قديمة العهد بين الجامعة وثيرمو فيشر‪ ،‬ويركز على‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫والتعاون في مجال األبحاث والتطوير‪.‬‬ ‫ويهدف المركز إلى استثمار منصة ثيرمو فيشر الرائدة في الفحص المجهري‬ ‫اإللكتروني لتزويد علماء الجامعة والمتعاونين معها بإمكانيات االستكشاف‬ ‫والتجريب‪ .‬وسيستفيد شركاء الجامعة في القطاع الصناعي‪ ،‬الموجودون في مدينة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫أيضا من قربهم من المعرفة التطبيقية العميقة‬ ‫األبحاث والتقنية التابعة للجامعة‪،‬‬ ‫التي تمتاز بها ثيرمو فيشر في علوم المواد‪.‬‬ ‫وقال مايكل شافر‪ ،‬رئيس دائرة المواد والتحليل البنيوي في ثيرمو فيشر‪" :‬يجمعنا‬ ‫بجامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية تاريخ طويل‪ ،‬ونحن نتطلع إلى مواصلة‬ ‫التميز الجديد هذا‪ .‬وستتاح للجامعة فرصة‬ ‫التعاون والنهوض بالتقنية من خالل مركز‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫النهوض باألبحاث العلمية في مجاالت أبحاث الحفز الكيميائي والجسيمات النانوية‬ ‫وعلوم الحياة‪ ،‬وذلك بفضل اكتسابها إمكانية النفاذ إلى أحدث تقنيات التمييز‬ ‫والمعدات الحاسوبية والبرمجيات المتوفرة في السوق"‪.‬‬ ‫ومن جانبه‪ ،‬قال الدكتور جاستن ماينار‪ ،‬مدير المختبرات األساسية والمرافق الرئيسية‬ ‫"يجسد هذا المركز مهمة شراكتنا‬ ‫في جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية‪:‬‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫االستراتيجية مع ثيرمو فيشر التي تهدف لتحقيق أهدافنا المشتركة في النهوض‬ ‫بتقنيات التصوير عالية األداء‪ .‬ويسعى تعاوننا إلى رفع القدرات واإلمكانيات التجريبية‬ ‫التميز بغية تزويد طلبتنا وهيئة تدريسنا‬ ‫للفحص المجهري اإللكتروني في مركز‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫وباحثينا وشركائنا بمجموعة من المزايا والفرص العلمية غير المسبوقة في المملكة‬ ‫العربية السعودية"‪.‬‬

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‫‪www.kaust.edu.sa‬‬

‫وإلى ذلك‪ ،‬فقد ّ‬ ‫تخلل حفل افتتاح المركز وضع المجهر اإللكتروني النافذ الماسح‬ ‫تيتان ذيميس زد (‪ )Titan Themis Z‬من شركة (‪ )FEI‬في الخدمة‪ .‬ويشار إلى أن‬ ‫ً‬ ‫تطورا من بين المجاهر‬ ‫هذا المجهر هو المجهر اإللكتروني التحليلي النافذ األكثر‬ ‫ً‬ ‫تجاريا حتى اآلن‪ ،‬وأول مجهر من نوعه يجري تركيبه في العالم‪ .‬وتجدر‬ ‫المتوفرة‬ ‫اإلشارة إلى أن علماء المواد يستخدمون مجهر (‪ )Titan Themis Z‬لفهم العالقات‬ ‫بين الخواص الفيزيائية واسعة النطاق للمواد وتركيبها وبنيتها على المستوى الذري‪.‬‬ ‫وينضم هذا النظام إلى أنظمة الفحص المجهري اإللكتروني المتطورة ً‬ ‫جدا المركبة‬ ‫ً‬ ‫مسبقا في المركز‪ ،‬التي تضم ‪ 16‬مجهر فحص إلكتروني من ثيرمو فيشر‪.‬‬ ‫عد الخطوة التنفيذية األولى في إطار‬ ‫ومن الجدير بالذكر أن مركز‬ ‫التميز هذا ُي ّ‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫استراتيجية جامعة الملك عبداهلل للعلوم والتقنية لبناء عالقات شراكة طويلة األجل‬ ‫ً‬ ‫نموذجا للفرص المستقبلية لتزويد‬ ‫مع مزودي المعدات الدقيقة الرئيسيين‪ .‬ويمثل‬ ‫مستخدمي الجامعة والمتعاونين معها على كامل رقعة المملكة العربية السعودية‬

‫بمرافق األبحاث المتطورة وبالتدريب والخدمات‪.‬‬

My University Sara Wilson Sara Wilson, an M.S. student in the Reef Ecology Lab, part of the University's Red Sea Research Center (RSRC), joined the lab as an intern in early 2016 and returned later that year as a student.

The native Californian studies fish population genetics, using genetic tools to locate the parents of the fish she collects. From this "genetic trail," she can then infer how far baby fish have traveled from their birth. Information gathered from these studies helps to inform wild fisheries managers in their efforts to protect areas that produce fish stock.

Wilson first came to KAUST in the summer of 2015, where she participated in a three-week intensive marine science Red Sea summer course.

“The summer course was essential to me committing to a master’s degree at KAUST. Being able to see KAUST firsthand, I fell in love with the beautiful campus, the lab facilities, the recreational activities and— most of all—the community of people. I also learned more about the type of work being done at KAUST and got to meet the people I could potentially work with,” she said.

Wilson also cites the major influence of her advisor Associate Professor Michael Berumen as a crucial factor in choosing KAUST as the next step in her academic career, noting, “Michael Berumen is the reason I came to KAUST. If it hadn't been for him, I would have never heard about KAUST. After meeting Mike and hearing about KAUST, I was ready to move here.”

Where do you read The Beacon?

1

What's cookin' at KAUST? KAUST community members Melanie Balkner-Zielke, Philippa Arkley and Eric Bakken have been working on the "International Cooking with KAUST" community cookbook for the past year.

As the project grows, more volunteers with a passion for food from their home countries are needed.

The cookbook team hosts one nationality per week, inviting native cooks to team up and cook traditional foods from their home country. The team then photographs and documents the recipes and the chefs with their final dishes. They encourage participants to show the true side of their home nations, be that through traditional dress, stories behind the dishes they make or special souvenirs that can be included in the final photographs. The end result will be a beautiful cookbook showcasing the wonderful multicultural KAUST community.

If you do not see your home country on the list below and think you have a great recipe and would like to appear in the cookbook, then please get in touch. The team would love to hear from you.

The following nationalities have been completed: Algeria, Austria, Belarus, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Jamaica, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Singapore, Ukraine Contact the cookbook team at: melanie.balknerzielke@kaust. edu.sa or philippa.arkley@kaust.edu.sa.

2 This month's submission comes from Lisa Cambell, a chartered procurement and supply professional from the University's Procurement Services. Campbell and her family (from left to right: Lisa, Harry, Catherine, Alex and Cory) read The Beacon at 3,000 meters above sea level in front of the Potala Palace, the former home of the Dalai Lama in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

"We took the photo on the day we landed in Lhasa, Tibet, and we made it there just four hours after landing, which was great prep for the further 2,200 meters we would be going to the next day to get to Mount Everest Base Camp," Cambell said.

Due to flight delays stemming from bad weather and a limited travel window, the family had almost no time to acclimatize to the high altitude, but they safely reached Mount Everest Base Camp within 48 hours of arriving in Lhasa.

"It was absolutely worth the extremes of high altitude and cold to visit the Potala Palace and Base Camp," said Campbell. "My kids left behind a KAUST School flag at the Base Camp sign to mark their journey, and my husband and I renewed our wedding vows after 20 years of marriage as the sun rose over Mount Everest."

32

THE BEACON | JUNE 2017

4 1. Community members Laura Ochoa and Pablo Carrasco Zanini (left)

cooked up some delicious food from their native Mexico for the KAUST community cookbook project. Eric Bakken (right) takes their photo for the cookbook.

2, 3, 4. Tasty dishes from around the world abound in the upcoming "International Cooking with KAUST" cookbook. Photos courtesy of the cookbook team.

3