Prof. Salah Alnajem is the founder and CEO of Information Age for I.T. consultations (www.information-age-consulting.com). He is also aprofessor of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing at Kuwait University (from 1998 until present). He received his master’s and PhD degrees in Computational Linguistics from Essex University in England. He worked as a consultant in the Ministry of Information (From 2016 until 2018) and the Ministry of Education (From 2020 till 2021). He is also a member of the technical committee of the board of the Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority (CITRA) in Kuwait (From 2020 until 2022). He worked as a Consultant in the Office of Consultative Studies and Research at the Amiri Diwan (Royal Court) (from 2000 until 2015). He worked also as a Consultant in the Central Agency for Information Technology (from 2006 until 2015). Prof. Salah also worked as a consultant at the National Assembly (Kuwaiti Parliament) (From 2015 till 2017). He also worked as a consultant for the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kuwait University (from 2004 till 2016 and from 2013 till 2015). He worked also as a consultant for the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (from 2013 till 2014). Prof. Salah also worked as a producer and host of Information Technology shows at Kuwait TV (from 2004 till 2018).
Prof. Salah Al-Najem won the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prize 2017 in the E-Learning Category for his project (E-Learning and Virtual Classroom). The award is offered by the United Nations through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Prof. Alnajem received the prize on the 13th of June 2017 from the International Telecommunication Union Secretary General in the award ceremony held in Geneva during the WSIS forum organized by the ITU in collaboration with the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the UN Development Program (UNDP).
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) selected the project of Prof. Salah Alnajem “Social Intelligence” as WISIS Prizes 2019 Champion during WSIS Prizes 2019 event at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum 2019. Prof. Alnajem received the certificate on the 12 April 2019 from the International Telecommunication Union Secretary General in the WSIS Forum organized in Geneva by the ITU. The project of Prof. Salah was a Social Media Analytics system which utilizes various Natural Language Processing techniques. The system provides content analysis and sentiment analysis of social media posts written in Modern Standards Arabic and Kuwaiti dialect.
During his work in the Central Agency for Information Technology, he worked as a member in a number of committees supervising a number of Information Technology and E-Government projects. These committees include: Steering Committee for Designing and Developing the Official Portal of Kuwait (e.gov.kw), Committee for Establishing and Administrating Comprehensive and Self Service Centers in Kuwait Governates, Committee for Refurbishing Personal Computers used in the Governmental Sector, and the Committee for Media Awareness and National Human Capacity Building in the Field of Information Technology. He also worked as a member of the technical committee for the board of the Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority (CITRA).
He also worked as a member in a number of committees supervising the implementation of projects related to E-Learning. These committees include, Committee for Using Information and Communication Technology in Education (Ministry of Education), Academic Committee for E-Learning (Kuwait University) and the Committee for Establishing Smart Classes used in Applying E-Learning (Kuwait University).
His scientific interests and research papers are focused on the following main areas: Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Text Processing, Text Mining, Data Analytics and Visualization, Information Retrieval, E-Government, and E-Learning. One of his academic publications is a chapter in book about Arabic language processing:
