LAU women in IT forge ahead
As technology advances at dazzling rates, LAU’s female IT students, faculty, staff and alumni move full speed ahead.
It takes a conventional algorithm 107 seconds to retrieve multimedia data from a database. Rawa Karaki, an LAU graduate student in Computer Science, has invented an algorithm that can retrieve the same data in six seconds. Put simply, she has come up with a way for multimedia searches to happen 100 seconds faster than they currently do. Karaki’s work has the potential to optimize the speed at which multimedia databases work worldwide, with vast possible implications, such as faster searches on Facebook, Instagram and even YouTube videos. Soon, she will be publishing a conference and journal paper to showcase her outstanding work.
According to Karaki, women in IT are often victims of prejudice in the workforce. “Employers in our field want to hire men. They think women are not productive as men or that men are more logical thinkers by nature. They also worry that women will simply get pregnant and leave their jobs.” Since her appointment as a Web and Systems Developer at the IT Department of the Lebanese International University, Karaki shyly confesses that her department is now more eager to hire women over men.
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