Dr. Hebah Elgibreen - How did your time at MIT impact your work? - Part 3 скачать в хорошем качестве

Dr. Hebah Elgibreen - How did your time at MIT impact your work? - Part 3

IBK Director Prof Kamal Youcef-Toumi interviewed Dr. Hebah Elgibreen in her lab at King Saud University in Riyadh in 2022. Prof Kamal mentored Dr. Hebah during her IBK fellowship at MIT. Transcript Prof Kamal: If you don't mind saying just a little bit about your time at MIT and how that experience as part of the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship program helped you or inspired you to do perhaps some other things and then when you came back and then establishing this whole lab in robotics and AI here at King Saud University? Dr. Hebah: The experience is like a snowball, has a snowball effect! So every day it's increasing and even affecting not only me, but even the community around me. When I started in MIT the ecosystem of MIT and how everyone works together, even MIT and Harvard, how they collaborate with each other was fascinating. And working with the students as you remember in the lab in MIT and mechanical engineering although there are engineers and computer scientists they have open minds over there. How they are open to any questions and how we worked together, it was fascinating for me. And how having a shared goal would actually make the team in the end make a difference. When I got the chance to come back here to Saudi Arabia there had been a shift. So I came back here by the end of 2017 and even then in the country there started to be a shift to more of emerging technology and applied science. And having expertise in that field, especially in a female, encouraged the department to open selective courses in that area. So now because they have me and they have also Dr Heba [Kurdi] who is an Ibn Khaldun fellow, it encouraged the the department to open these kind of courses. And we were able to teach students about robotics even though they are computer scientists. Not only that, seeing inspirational characters in the colleges from females working in robotics and AI encouraged the students to work on projects out of curriculum projects in that area. Now I can see more female students asking about this area, interested to work on it even though they come from different departments in the computer science college, they still communicate with me, asking, Can I have like a half an hour mentorship session to ask about these kind of work? Is it possible that I can work on it? Is it possible to have resources? Having this kind of experience and bringing it back to the students and seeing this kind of mentorship in the university inspired the students and encouraged them to work more. In addition to that, because of the support, that we have now in the university and even around the country we were able to even a leader for labs and centers that specialize in AI and computer science that is related to robotics. I'm even a member in the Robotic Research Center in the the college so there has been more than a center that is now open for females which was formerly wasn't that the case. I would say it was an exciting journey for me personally and also an added value for my community coming back after that. Prof Kamal: Excellent! I think for me it's an amazing thing to see you, know from where you started, also with your great interest in robotics and coming to be with us at MIT. And then coming here and then making up a lab, the classes and now having a lot of the students and female students interested in this area. I think this is a great impact that I see.