About me

Early in life, I realized that starting and managing my own company in addition to getting involved in the development of new devices or technology is my main professional goal. I had the heart and mind of an entrepreneur and inventor. Yet, it was not clear in which business the company will operate and what technology it will create. As I grew older and smarter, the picture became brighter. Consistently, I was ranked among the top three students in my class. In my senior year in high school, I passed with flying colors and ranked 13th on the national examination with 98.9% GPA. This granted me a full-scholarship from Abu Dhabi University -ranked the 7th in UAE- but choosing my bachelor degree major was not easy. My fondness for math and physics led me to the belief that majoring in electrical engineering would feed my hunger for these subjects and pave the way for my professional goal. Luckily, an electrical engineering major was not offered in the university at the time. As an alternative, my father suggested computer science (CS) declaring that it would lead technological advancement in the coming years and he turned out to be right. Following my father’s advice made me realize that this field is indeed bringing me closer and faster to my dream. 

My interest in CS courses magnified rapidly. Soon, programming subjects became my favorite to the extent that the university sent me to all national programming contests. While a sophomore, Paul Graham’s blog made me more and more fascinated with entrepreneurship and computer science supremacy. I shared this passion with one of my professors whose lectures drove me to believe in our mutual interest in setting up a business. After graduation, he asked me to work as a research assistant for him. This opportunity made me recognize the true meaning of inventor. Precisely, I saw research as a venue to develop innovative technologies, discover new information and establish original science. For two years, we worked in mobile-application development, ubiquitous computing and pervasive technology. Then, the American University of Sharjah -ranked the 2nd in UAE- granted me a full-scholarship to pursue my master degree. I continued my research work there for two more years but in a different domain. Particularly, we worked in artificial intelligence and data mining and more specifically, sentiment mining of Arabic dialect text. 

Shortly before graduation, I participated and presented my master thesis research idea in a Startup Weekend event organized by Dubai SME. Fortunately, my idea was elected among the top 20 ideas from a pool of 56 ideas. From the 20 ideas, four ideas were awarded a 4-month free business coaching and training and my idea was one of them. Additionally, all the top 20 ideas received free company incubation and licensing by Dubai SME. Sadly, I had to focus on my research work to submit my master thesis before the end of the semester, therefore, seizing that golden opportunity was not possible for me at that time. 

After graduation, I worked for two years as a computer science teacher in a private school and later as a research associate in UAE University (UAEU) -ranked the 1st in UAE and 350 in the QS World University Rankings- for two years. While working in UAEU I became captivated by sensing technologies. We employed piezoelectric sensors and various physiological sensors such as GSR, ECG, EMG to monitor human health, emotional status and measure productivity for physically demanding jobs such as construction trades. The majority of my research activity involved data/signal acquisition, preprocessing, and analysis. In several projects, I had to integrate and acquire data from various devices manufactured by different vendors. Then, I had to fuse the different data types that are acquired from multiple data sources. When processing the signals, I usually perform detrending, normalization, noise removal. For the analysis, I have used various software tools and algorithms depending on the research problem. For instance, I have used Principale Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) and clustering algorithms. For classification, if required, I have used Support Vector Machine (SVM) and artificial neural networks (ANN) and other algorithms. 

In August 2017, I started learning about blogging, Google Ads and WordPress. I learnt that you can make money online without the need for physical products. Therefore, while working as a research associate in UAE university, I set up my first blog privatetutorguru.com I decided to blog about tutoring since I had success in the profession and I was making a really good income from it. The blog did not bring lots of income but I learnt alot about SEO, social media management and traffic. I decided to resign and start my own business. 

 In April, 2018, I started my own research and software development company LabsTabs FZE. The website for my startup company is https://www.labstabs.com/. I financed and licensed the company from my personal savings. LabsTabs is a consultancy company for IT-Based scientific research and software development. I decided to specialize in the two things I do best: research and software development. Our clients were from Abu Dhabi University, Sharjah University, UAE university and Zayed University. For two and half years, we supported research and development in these universities. Also, we have been working on developing our own apps. The first app we developed is called Alaa lilEmla (iSpell) علاء للإملاء. This app has only an Android version. It had more than 87000 downloads in Google Play store. The app average rating was 4.4 from 140 reviews. I also developer Sooraaa صووورااا which is an online image search engine for Arabic speakers. 

Then, I co-founded Crooz,  Crooz is an Abu Dhabi based start-up that aims to revolutionize the GCC insurance industry. Developed in 2019, it is the first Behavior Based Insurance app in the GCC, a step further from Usage Based Insurance. Crooz was selected as one of the semi-finalist for the 14th MIT Arab startup competition 14th edition.

Currently, I am a co-founder and CTO at Ezze Technology. Ezze is an online marketplace for car renting in UAE. Through Ezze, users can choose from different rental companies, compare prices and cars through a comparison-shopping format that allows them to search by vehicle type, pick-up location, dates needed, and other criteria. Ezze’s customers can book their preferred vehicle directly through Ezze and paying with their Visa or Mastercard. Ezze also provides an end-to-end solution for car rental companies to manage the entire car rental process online, from administration to customer service to renting cars, in order to gain productivity and eliminate inefficiencies in their business.

 I am a highly motivated individual, swift and independent learner and extremely curious scientist. Those characteristics along with my critical thinking and problem-solving abilities made a career in research an ideal profession for me. In fact, I am the first born child in my family and I have typical first-born characteristics such as being reliable, conscientious, structured, cautious, leader, high achiever and perfectionist. Moreover, I consider myself a talented programmer. 

My passion for solving challenging programming questions and competing in programming contests have nourished this talent. Actually, I know more than 10 programming languages. For desktop applications development, I used C,C++, Java, Visual Basic, C#.Net, Matlab, and Python. For mobile applications development, I utilized Symbian C++, J2ME, App Inventor, and Java for Android. For web applications, I employed PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript and Python (Django framework). For Database development, I made use of MS Access and Mysql. Furthermore, I have used several IDE and frameworks such as Eclipse and visual studio for desktop programming; Django framework, Adobe Dreamweaver, WAMP and XAMPP servers, WordPress for web development; Weka IDE for data mining; Android Studio and Netbeans for mobile app development. Presently, I am learning Tensorflow, an open-source software library for dataflow programming and machine learning applications such as neural networks. My work experience was the primary venue for me to explore those tools and learn these languages.