Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to issue #30  of KICconnect, the first issue of 2021.

I would like to start by wishing you all a very happy New Year. I hope you have had an enjoyable and restful Winter Break. 

As we enter the next decade, I am hopeful of a productive and healthy year ahead. COVID-19 continues to affect all our lives, but with a vaccine now widely available in all Emirates, and with strict adherence to our health and safety protocols, we will be working hard to minimise the negative effects on our Community. Currently, we will continue our learning and teaching online/blended mode in line with the Ministry of Education directives. 

We have a busy semester ahead of us. This week we held our first Open Day of the year, for prospective students. We continue to recruit new members of faculty, we have been working on submissions for the re-accreditation of Business Administration, Health Management, Computer Graphics and Animation, and Mass Communication programmes. We will also be working on the submission of applications for new programmes, especially those from the Health and Medical Sciences Department. Internal audits of our academic departments start next week as we strive to continuously improve our service delivery.

I am pleased to announce a unique initiative in support of our students of determination in collaboration with the UAE Red Crescent. The Red Crescent kindly provided KIC with a donation link that can be accessed directly from our website.

We have had a successful first implementation of Blue Explorance, with student survey responses higher than ever before. I would like to encourage students to participate in surveys as we value your opinions on your learning journey and your responses are used to improve the quality of our courses and services.

This semester sees the launch of the new standing committee structure at KIC, an important tool to strengthen the governance of the College. The Institutional Quality, Effectiveness and Accreditation Department (IQEA) will lead the initiative for implementation.

Final exams for Fall Semester have now started. I would like to thank the Admissions and Registration Departments and the academic departments for all the effort they put into organising the exams. I wish all our students every success in their exams.

Please click on this link to make your donation for our students of determination: https://emiratesrc.ae/KIC/ 

Stay safe, Stay well.

Dr Assem Al-Hajj

Wrapping up 2020, KIC Mass Communication Department held its 6th Media Harvest.

The theme of the latest installment of Media Harvest was 'Student’s Creativity in eLearning' reflecting the impact of the pandemic and the adapted format of the event. 

Media Harvest is an annual platform that allows KIC Mass Communication students to present their media projects to KIC community and industry professionals.

Following the agenda's tradition, the opening sequence included the UAE national anthem, Quran verse, KIC history overview since 1985. Dr. Assem Al-Hajj, KIC President, Prof. Nabil El Kadhi, KIC VP for Academic Affairs, and Dr. Ibnaouf Hasan, KIC Mass Communication Department Head, welcomed the esteemed guests and students.

Dr. Santosh Ray, Head /Associate Professor, KIC IT Department, has collaborated on a project that aims to predict confirmed COVID-19 cases.

"Knowing the accurate number of COVID patients in advance will help hospitals and local governments to prepare themselves well to serve COVID patients in an effective manner," commented Dr. Ray. "Deep learning models usually make inaccurate predictions if they are trained with insufficient data. Therefore, in the circumstances where sufficient data is not available especially during the first few months of COVID pandemic, classical machine learning models trained on different types of data such as times series data, social media data, etc. may be combined to predict the number of confirmed cases. "

The project was led by Dr. Amir Ahmad, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Security in the College of Information Technology at United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), in collaboration with international researchers.

The team conducted a meta-analysis of associated COVID-19 case-prediction models to propose performance improvements, by leveraging machine learning to predict COVID-19 cases, and ultimately address the global pandemic.

Dr. Manjush Karthika and Ms. Chris Mathew were invited as the Guest Faculty to deliver academic sessions for Emergency Medicine Residents at SEHA, on their academic day.

During the initial surge of COVID-19 pandemic, HMSc Department of KIC extended its support to SEHA, by training the healthcare professionals in 'Essentials of Respiratory Care in COVID-19.' Following the highly acclaimed training sessions, our faculty members were once again invited to deliver more sessions.

Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi,  was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and scholar. However, it is mathematics that brought him to fame. 

He wrote a book on algebra, and a book on calculation that introduced to Europe the Hindu-Arabic numerals and the ways to do arithmetics with them.