(العربية)

Mohamed Shaker is a Syrian entrepreneur, born in Damascus in 1990. Mohamed has shown an interest in painting and engineering since his early childhood. This interest, which soon became a passion, crystallized into a major academic pursuit starting first at the university of Damascus. Here, he excelled for several years and received a bachelor's degree in computer engineering and artificial intelligence in 2013, before attending the University of Joseph-Fourier in Grenoble, France, where he received a Master's degree in human-machine interaction in 2015.

He has published a number of scientific papers in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which were published between 2013 and 2015. He has also spent time as a visiting researcher at the design laboratory of the technical university of Copenhagen. During the same period, he designed and deployed three games that were generated automatically without a designer, based on artificial intelligence.

Mohammed moved to Amsterdam in 2016 to work for the educational company Squla, which is concerned with transforming scientific content into an interactive activity.

Mohammed Shaker's scientific and professional work received attention from the TechCity UK Foundation in Britain, classifying him as an extraordinary first-level talent in 2018, after which he moved to London.

During his career, Mohammed has also been credited with running the technical side of NFX company in Britain, a medical professional company that helps stroke patients.

From London, where he has been living since 2018, Mohammed launched his first Arab startup company Al-Meta, which specializes in understanding and analyzing Arabic using artificial intelligence. At the beginning of 2020, he launched the “Mind Phrenology” educational platform for junior high school students. Both he and his team are additionally currently working on launching a new educational platform, called Alphazed, an artificially-intelligent educational platform for unconventional education of Arab children.

Arab-Swiss entrepreneurs: In a postmodernism age, with the results of the communication and information revolution, today's world is flooded with contradictory information and news, often coming to intercept facts approved by scientific complexes, such as the hazards of smoking, the necessity of traffic signals, and the denial of proven and documented incidents and facts at a high level. The process of obtaining knowledge and information-building has become a selective process that is subject to the person's desires and ideological orientations, how do you think “The Meta” can help to solve this dilemma in the Arab region?

Mohamed Shaker: This is a very important question. There are two important points I would like to talk about here.

1. The problem of opinion from one point of view is that we are all born in a certain environment with a certain background and beliefs. All of this shapes who we are, and why we hold on to a particular belief. Our instinct is to agree more with opinions consistent with our ideological background and to attack and rebut opinions that are different from our ideological background. This is very common among us.

Therefore, our first goal in Meta was to be an unaffiliated platform, and to be a platform for showing all views to all Arabs. This is why, in Meta we have worked for four months to develop a system that automatically works to identify and consolidate articles on the same topic in one place (what we call in AI "one cluster" or "cluster"). Within each cluster, we automatically identify the views of each article and compare them with the views of other articles. We also automatically summarize these articles under "the most important thing to know about this news." All of this is then shown to the user to be aware of different points of view and to be aware of the importance of understanding them. See appendix:

We recently added the "News related to this topic" feature to any article. For example, you might see that in this article:

You'll see articles from other news sources on the same subject directly below them, along with the quality rating of their content. All of this is to give the user the right tools to dive into content better, more consciously and more deeply, whenever he or she wants.

We humans don't like absolute things, we like comparisons. A way of evaluating the quality of content and comparing several articles with similar content is the best method to achieve that outcome.

2. We use a non-human unguided agent to examine the content. I think the human factor is always skewed toward one viewpoint even if he or she doesn’t want it to. The existence of "correctly-controlled" industrial intelligence makes this process more reliable. You will find that we have dedicated our services to artificial intelligence. Anyone can enter any link to any Arab article and immedaitely understand the quality of its content. This service is also programmed using an API interface for any Arab or foreign company that wants to measure the quality of any given content. You can look at the appendices.

Arab-Swiss entrepreneurs: Google's search engine has been criticized for its work in selecting top stories on the basis that the highest payer will appear on top of the search results. Although Google's top news application was launched in 2018, which gave priority to reliable news at the expense of the "client experience" model and the most push sites, the problem remains. What are the criteria of selecting news on the Meta application? Do you have contracts of some kind with news sites, newspapers or news agencies?.

Mohamed Shaker: think that statement is quite right. It’s the "ethical AI" or "ethical intelligence" problem, which is a problem in any system that uses artificial intelligence. I will give you an example. In the area of autonomous vehicles, if for some reason the probability of an accident is 100%, will the "smart system" decide to crash into a child, an old man, or a wall (and cause the driver's inevitable death)? Will the intelligent system choose to save the driver and cause the old man to die because he is old or it will choose the child? All of these are questions we must ask, know their answer, and set controls. I think that in “Al-Meta” we are very much highlighting this concept. That is why we are among the very few Arab companies worldwide that publish how they build their artificial intelligence systems for advertising. For the simple reason that we want our audience to know how our systems work, to be available to all, and to add or request a modification. Despite our very small team size and the very high cost of these documents, we’ve done it from the first day of the platform. We now have over 100 articles on our blog – http://almeta.io/blog

Arab-Swiss entrepreneurs: The launch of a new application or platform needs at least six months, as industry professionals say, but with your six-member team, you can launch the Meta app and two educational platforms within a standard period (3-4 months), can you tell us what this success is all about?

Mohamed Shaker: It's best if I break this down into two points.

1. Team effort. Our team members are very carefully selected. My two main requirements for their recruitment were that they had designed or completed a perfect project from 0 to 100 themselves before. Second, they can take any idea from a mere concept to a final software product themselves. I think that when you set the hiring criteria bar so high, you will always be pleased later down the line. I met with 200 people to eventually choose four technical people. The hardest step in defining them as an engineering structure was switching them over from what they were used to in Arab countries. All of them surprised me with their willingness to learn and their ability to adapt very quickly. That's what I love about our team.
2. I think my previous experience working with Western start-ups was beneficial. In addition, I experienced the transition from being specialist in artificial intelligence to becoming more of a generalist, which means I constantly want to know more about everything. After I moved to the UK, I joined an emerging company where I was the only tech person, which helped me to learn a lot. This is because the process led me to employ everything I had learned in the past to create, design and implement a product from the idea stage to creating a complete platform by myself. It gave me the understanding of how to build complete products and projects from scratch without fear. It’s something I’ve gone through four times so far. In each case I went from nothing to a full product. This process would give any entrepreneur great self-confidence, since very few programmers are now generalists who can build complete systems themselves. My reading of books in different fields (including non-technical literature) has actually helped me within technical fields. I try to read 70-90 books a year. I think it has changed my thinking completely within the last ten years. It made me think differently to the conventional wisdom about the world of work (and outside of work too).

The Swiss Arab entrepreneurs: the spread of the covid 19 epidemic has affected all economic and social life, and the education sector has suffered most of the damage caused by the epidemic. You have had an impact on facing the effects of the epidemic on the education sector in the Arab region by launching the Alphazid and Mind Phrenology educational platforms. What can you tell us about these platforms? Where do you find the medium-term future for digital education in the Arab region?

Mohamed Shaker: We started about four months before the COVID outbreak with the launch of the “Mind Phrenology" platform for secondary and tertiary students and their psychological support, which is a completely overlooked aspect of the secondary "signs." If schools and universities continue to be closed, we will focus more on the "Mind Phrenology" and within two weeks we will have launched an integrated learning application that also incorporates the educational aspect of the secondary grades. Its simple function is to provide all educational videos from the best teachers and schools in one platform and to make search and web services available to everyone. The application is free for everyone and is available to any secondary or tertiary student. Then we’ve also focused on an app for younger kids 6-12 years old with "alphazed." We could have launched it on May 5, 2020. But I eventually decided to delay and build up it to provide an educational environment for children that is completely different from any other educational application, Arab or foreign. The application delivers content in the same way we learn as we are young, which is in a conversational and the anecdotal style rather than the conventional learning style (you can see some prototypes here: https://thealphazed.com/). I wanted it Arabic with a new creative Arabic sense, so applying Al-Fazid takes a lot of my interest at the moment and will be available in July of 2020.

Arab-Swiss entrepreneurs: Twitter recently announced that it would allow its employees to work remotely permanently even after the (COVID 19) shutdown is over. Can twitter's actions be considered an indicator of a telecommuting model of the business landscape in the near future, Or will the expansion of the adoption of the tele-business model remain a casual issue that retreats with the end of the virus-related closure (COVVE19)?

Mohamed Shaker: I think we can reshape the question, will COVID affect only the business sector or life in general? Here in the West, there is a great concern, for example, about public transportation. I think those concerns are legitimate. You can ask the question, when will you feel safe riding on London's public transport? In most cases that won’t be until there is a vaccine and it is available to everyone. Because it is impossible to imagine being in London Underground without the rush-hour crowds of 8:30 a.m, I think that this will shape our overall lives for the next of the year, at least in the West. I think that will lead us to be more dynamic as human beings. Not only due to COVID, but how we are aligned with any other future habits. As Darwin says: The species that will remain is the most adaptable species, not necessarily the strongest. So I think that same concept applies perfectly to today’s Arab companies, including those of foreigners.

Arab-Swiss entrepreneurs: Through your experience in the remote working environment, what challenges and benefits do you have from adopting this model?

Mohamed Shaker: I think it is a process that can be measured from three points of view.

1. From the company's point of view: The freedom to choose the most efficient methods without hindrance from geographical locations.
2. From the employee's point of view (called the word "abday" in Meta): Having the freedom to plan their time and choose how their day is divided. They have more time for themselves to learn new things or to spend time with their family.
3. From the point of view of the country where the employee lives: I think the economic recovery is very good in this case in the Arab countries, which have competent young people who want to learn and work on efficient projects. This is a very important point at this moment in time because of the current situation of the Arab countries.

Arab-Swiss entrepreneurs: Projects that you have launched are self-financing, and so far there have been no profit yeilding through these projects, what is your future plan to achieve financial gains through these projects?

Mohamed Shaker: Although I have reservations about the behavior of Elon Musk recently, I will always remember him saying what I have always thought of since the beginning of these projects: "When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor." Its meaning is that: "When you work on things of importance, you make an effort for their success even if the circumstances and opportunities are against you."

With reference to our learning application, I think the current situation in the Arab region (outside the Gulf region) for education and content projects is difficult and unprofitable in the short term and, therefore, will be difficult in the long term. Arab startups are moving away from the main problems in our country and are focusing on many unhelpful apps at the expense of useful apps. Unfortunately, useful applications are not profitable and have little audience because of the country's difficult situation, most app users are looking for something that distracts them, putting their mind at ease.

But, I like to do this because it is important for my people and nation and I think I can do a lot in this aspect because of my background in engineering, education, and design. I think it is a background that makes it incumbent on me to bring experience to my people. This is what many Arab expatriates in the West overlook when they forget things that tie them to their homeland.

At the same time, I do not think it is a good thing to see that the project is not profit-making and far-reaching. Because if we can't afford it, we won't be able to deliver our products as originally intended.

Thinking 100 years forward changes your view of things. I like to think at the start of a learning project like Alphazed about what the world will look like 100 years from now. Its impact will not be visible until the current generation expands and I won’t even be here by the year 2100. But if we start it now, we will have added and improved the education of generations to come. Not just one generation, but every generation from today to 2100 and beyond.

Thinking now about the financial return, if we can deliver the most useful and best learning experience 100 times but at one tenth of the cost of others, and make it available for 100 million users instead of 10,000, then we have achieved a financial return that is sufficient to achieve a long-term vision for the next 100 years. We can also reap a financial dividend that will drive us to change generations to come, not just a single generation. This is my idea for an educational project like Alphazed.

For the Meta, the subject is similar. What can the Meta do? In 100 years? I think the Meta is much bigger than that. There are no limits to the amount of creativity and growth that can occur, for Arab minds in particular and for the wider human population in general. If we can change from Arab reality based on a one-view theory and if we can provide services to other companies to use this tech in new applications, our influence will not be limited to 300 million Arabs, but available for any human being and person who believe in the cohesion of ideas.