Syrian engineer wins $1m ‘Arab Coders’ challenge in Dubai

DUBAI: Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Chairman of The Executive Council of Dubai and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Dubai Future Foundation, today honoured the winners of the “One Million Arab Coders” challenge, which featured a total prize money of $1,350,000.

The winners were honoured at the closing ceremony of the challenge held at the Museum of the Future in Dubai.

Sheikh Hamdan said on his Twiter account: “We congratulate the winner of ‘One Million Arab Coders,’ Mahmoud Shahoud, the Syrian engineer, for his remarkable achievement.

“Truly deserving of the one-million-dollar prize for his project, the ‘Habit 360 application’, Shahoud is a true representation of an Arab innovator. We also congratulate all the winners and participants in the ‘One Million Arab Coders’ initiative, who have successfully employed the language of the future in developing pioneering projects that will contribute to achieving a qualitative leap in their societies.”

He further said, “One Million Arab Coders’ has paved the way for Arab youth to broaden their horizons and sparked their innovation and creativity in the field of advanced technology.”

Sheikh Hamdan went on to say that the ‘One Million Arab Coders’ initiative, which was launched in 2017 by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, has succeeded in becoming a gateway for many Arab youth to use their programming skills to realise their dreams and aspirations.

The winner, Mahmoud Shahoud, is a sotware engineer from Syria who developed the ‘Habit 360 application’ that helps people build new habits, track their progress and stay motivated. The application has served more than 200,000 users from around the world.

The top five entrepreneurs in the ‘One Million Arab Coders’ challenge also received prizes of $50,000 each.

The winners included Egyptian programmer Muhammad Al Iskandarani for developing of the “Muaahal program.” Egyptian Programmer Iman Wagdy for developing the ‘3lfraza app,’ which delivers fresh food prepared by women at home.

Ammar Salem, an Iraqi university professor, joined the list of distinguished coders by developing the ‘Qeraaty Alnateqa’ programme.

Egyptianandrewmakramdevelopedthe‘najeb’ programme to facilitate and unify the process of submiting and marking exams. As for Engineer Hassan Mohamed, from Egypt, he developed a chat translation programme that allows users to talk to each other in their respective native languages and translates the conversation instantly. It is available in more than 36 languages.

For many people worldwide, having coton swabs thrust up their nose or down their throat to test for COVID-19 has become a routine and familiar annoyance. But two years into the pandemic, health officials in some countries are questioning the merits of repeated, mass testing when it comes to containing infections, particularly considering the billions it costs. Chief among them is Denmark, which championed one of the world’s most prolific COVID testing regimes early on.

Lawmakers are now demanding a close study of whether that policy was effective.

“We’ve tested so much more than other countries that we might have overdone it,” said Jens Lundgren, professor of infectious diseases at Rigshospitalet, University of Copenhagen, and memberofthegovernment’scovidadvisorygroup.

Japan avoided large-scale testing and yet weathered the pandemic relatively well, based on infection and death rates. Other countries, including Britain and Spain, have scaled back testing. Yet repeated testing of entire cities remains a central part of the “ZERO-COVID” plan in China, where leaders have threatened action against critics. “We need to learn, and no one did it perfectly,” said Dale Fisher, chair of the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.

The WHO urged countries to “test, test, test” all suspected cases ater the coronavirus was first identified. Global surveillance helped scientists understand the risk of severe illness or death, as well as the risk of transmission. Now, with the dominance of the relatively milder Omicron variant and the availability of vaccines and more effective treatments, governments should consider more strategic policies, such as population sampling, experts said. Pulling back too drastically, however, could leave the world blind to a still-changing virus, some officials said.

WHO guidelines have never recommended mass screening of asymptomatic individuals — as is currently happening in China — because of the costs involved and the lack of data on its effectiveness. Denmark ultimately recorded similar case numbers and death rates as other countries with less widespread testing. This has prompted a majority of parties in parliament to call for an investigation into the strategy.

In the last two years, Denmark’s population of 5.8 million logged more than 127 million rapid and PCR tests, all provided free. In total, Denmark spent more than 16 billion crowns ($2.36 billion) on testing, according to the Danish Critical Supply Agency. Neighbouring Norway, with a similar population size, only performed 11 million PCR tests, while Sweden, home to nearly twice as many people, completed around 18 million, according to Our World in Data. Christine Stabell Benn, professor of global health at University of Southern Denmark, said Denmark’s strategy was expensive and results “undocumented”. “The mass testing approach took away the focus from testing where it really maters: among the vulnerable.”

Other experts — and the Danish government — said widespread testing reduced the transmission rate and helped people re-enter society, boosting the economy and their own mental health. The economy took a relatively milder hit than other European countries, according to a government report released in September.

“There is no doubt that the human and economic costs of, for example, an extensive lockdown, as we have seen in many other countries, would be greater,” Justice Minister Nick Haekkerup told Reuters in an email. One Danish study published last year concluded that the testing programme and subsequent isolation of confirmed cases helped reduce transmission by up to 25%.

Other disease experts question such estimates. A review published in Medical Virology in late March on the use of rapid tests for people without symptoms in mass screening initiatives found “uncertainty” over their impact.

“The claim was that (mass testing) would stop the pandemic in its tracks, and that it would cut transmission by 90%. And it hasn’t,” said Angela Raffle, a senior lecturer at Bristol University Medical School, who has worked with the UK’S National Screening Commitee.