Signature Research Program SRP

GO
  • Home
  • Signature Research Program

Signature Research Program

Overview

The Signature Research Program (SRP) is a new platform launched by the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) aimed at promoting innovative and impactful research through cross-entity interdisciplinary collaboration within HBKU and beyond.

Through a shared vision, objectives, framework and resources (see diagram below), the program aims to develop an ongoing set of well-integrated research clusters that will carve out distinctive research areas for HBKU in the region and internationally, and to make HBKU a hub to attract and develop talent.

Research Focus

  • Establish research excellence in niche areas
  • Integrate a set of interdisciplinary projects with shared focus and objectives
  • Build competitiveness in research

Collaboration

  • Build networks within and outside HBKU focused on specific research
  • Attract local and international collaborators

Resource Planning and Optimization

  • Better resource allocation based on priorities and research quality
  • Concentration of resources
  • Resource sharing
  • Create a sustainable funding model to support priority research

Capacity Building

  • Build competitive research capacity in focused areas
  • Attract and develop talent
  • Enhance HBKU’s reputation

Cycle 1 Overview

It is in our core mission to support Qatar’s society to prosper and strengthen its cultural roots and identity. As the world continues to change at an accelerating rate, social progress is increasingly essential to protect our heritage, culture, community, and the future of our children.

Our research focus in social progress cuts across five key areas:

  • Arabic Language, Culture and Heritage
  • Social Responsibility
  • Social Inclusion
  • Ethics and Policy
  • Family Cohesion

Cycle 1 of the Signature Research Program brings together expertise and knowledge from four HBKU colleges: College of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Public Policy, College of Law and College of Islamic Studies. HBKU collaborates with many local and international institutes and organizations to tackle pressing issues that cut across priority areas under social progress.

SRP Cluster 1

Managing Social Transformation in Qatar: Risks, Trends and Future Trajectories

The aim is to produce strategic insights that contribute to an understanding of the forces and trends shaping the future trajectories of Qatari society across socio-cultural and socio-economic domains.

The SRP Cluster 1 will examine four key strategic areas:

  1. Higher Education: Participation, skills and training, quality, and international competitiveness
  2. Public Health & Technology: Capacity, service delivery, gaps, and inefficiencies
  3. Culture and transformation: Identity, language, and cultural ‘stresses’
  4. Social welfare and protection: Social inclusion, elderly, housing, disability

Major outputs include the identification of:

  1. Sectoral trends, highlighting emerging key threats and potential fissure points
  2. Policy pathways, strategic choices, and decision points
  3. Potential ‘shocks’ and impact assessment
  4. Legal and governance gaps, including regulatory and policy gaps

Team members

SRP Cluster 2

Explorations in Developing an HBKU Index of Social Cohesion

The International Social Cohesiveness Index falls short of accounting for different contexts and variables. This research cluster, therefore, aims at developing an HBKU Index of an interdisciplinary construct that can fill in the gaps and provide an index of this multifaceted construct that could be used in Qatar and the region.

The SRP Cluster 2 covers three domains:

  • The economic domain: Exclusion, equality, and inequality
  • The political domain: Legitimacy/illegitimacy via trust in institutions, participation/passivity via social capital or political participation
  • The sociocultural domain: Acceptance/rejection via solidarity as well as affiliation/isolate via socio cultural participation

Major outputs would include:

  • Review paper on social cohesion: An Islamic perspective
  • Social Media Dataset annotated for misinformation, polarization, and propaganda
  • HBKU-Social Cohesion Index Report

Team members

Cycle 2 Overview

Cycle 2 of the SRP focuses on artificial intelligence (AI), one of HBKU’s focus areas. It prioritizes Generative AI (GenAI), which is rapidly transforming our world and has the potential to address some of humanity’s most pressing challenges, including sustainable development, precision medicine, and personalized education. However, GenAI also poses new challenges, such as the potential for bias, misuse, and unintended consequences.

HBKU researchers in multidisciplinary, cross-entity teams will focus on the following topics:

  • AI for Personalized Education
  • Safe, Responsible, and Ethical AI
  • AI for Science

Project 1: Advancing Qatar's AI Landscape: Developing an Arabic-Centric and Ethically-Aligned Large Language Model

This project aims to develop a robust, ethically-aligned Large Language Model (LLM) that embodies the Arabic and Islamic identity. Our approach will build on Arabic-centric LLMs that are pre-trained with Arabic language text, by customizing the alignment and fine-tuning phases to reflect the unique linguistic and cultural context of Qatar more accurately. This effort seeks to create a new standard in AI, focusing on technology that is not only cutting-edge but also culturally and ethically relevant.

The study will focus on four primary objectives:

  1. Creating a dataset for multiplex ethics
  2. Developing alignment methods compatible with multiplexity
  3. Detecting attacks targeting human-value alignment of LLMs
  4. Showcasing diverse application scenarios

Major outputs include:

  1. Dataset for multiplex ethics
  2. New alignment methods
  3. Fine-tuned models for different applications
  4. Publications
  5. Teaching material for multiplex AI ethics

Team members

Project 2: AI-EDAPT: Artificial Intelligence for Educational Adaptation, Personalization, and Transformation

The project aims to advance the understanding and implementation of GenAI tools in higher education settings, focusing on enhancing personalized learning experiences. By developing a system that uses LLMs, such as LLaMA2 and ChatGPT, to monitor and analyze student interactions with GenAI tools, it seeks to improve teaching methods and learning outcomes and tailor educational practices to individual learning styles.

The study focuses on:

  1. Developing and integrating an innovative system based on open-source LLM to monitor and analyze students' interactions with GenAI tools within the educational context of HBKU.
  2. Evaluating and analyzing the impact of ChatGPT1 (e.g., GPT-4, LLaMa2) on a) course design and teaching activities, b) student learning and critical thinking, c) the relationship between student learning styles and their use of ChatGPT
  3. Providing empirical evidence and insights into the effective use of ChatGPT as EduLLM in education, contributing to developing guidelines and best practices for its implementation.
  4. Disseminating the findings and recommendations to the broader educational and academic communities through workshops, publications, and presentations.

Major outputs include:

  1. Application to monitor student interactions with GenAI tools
  2. Analysis reports on student interactions
  3. Ethical guidelines and best practices
  4. Publications

Team members

X Close
X Close
Close