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Texas A&M at Qatar faculty participates in Smart Cities panel

Published Dec 30, 2020

Dr. Saber Trabelsi, assistant professor of mathematics in the Science Program at Texas A&M University at Qatar, participated in a panel discussion in the Doha Smart Cities Summit.

The panel, “Smart City Pandemic Readiness panel,” explored how smart cities dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of technology in mitigating the effects. Other panelists included Andrey Telenkov, CEO of NTechLab, Lana Khalaf, Country Manager of Microsoft Qatar, and Aseem Joshi, Global Smart Cities Leader at Honeywell with Nizar Hneini moderating.

The panel addressed various scenarios and services that smart cities need to develop to effectively combat future pandemics. Trabelsi highlighted the importance of academia and industry collaborations to design ICT defense systems against the spread of viruses and future pandemics, especially through modeling and simulations. The essence of smart cities depends on the development of smart models and data collection that can provide real time feedback and qualitative warnings, according to Trabelsi.

“Today and future challenges the humanity will face are too complex to be addressed by a single branch of science, or a single scientific expertise,” Trabelsi said. “The key is in multidisciplinary research and in the collaboration of scientists and engineers with different expertise from various fields. At Texas A&M at Qatar, we are aware that the future engineers and scientists we are educating should be able to work, collaborate, and lead multidisciplinary teams to yield sustainable impact on the society and humanity.”