Mohammed AlSharekh

Mohammed AlSharekh (Arabic: محمد الشارخ; Kuwait, 1942^[1]) is a Kuwaiti entrepreneur and author, he is the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Sakhr Software Company. Through Sakhr, he introduced the first Arabic language Operating System into computers.^[2]

Mohammed Al-Sharekh
محمد الشارخ
Born	1942 Kuwait City, Kuwait
Other names	Abu Fahd
Alma mater	Cairo University Williams College
Occupation(s)	businessperson, writer
Years active	1969-present
Known for	MSX Sakhr
Children	4, including Fahad and Alanoud

Early life and education

AlSharekh was born in Kuwait in 1942. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics and Political Science from Cairo University in 1965,^[3] and earned his master's degree in Development Economics in 1968 from Williams College in the State of Massachusetts, US.^[4]

Career

AlSharekh served as the Deputy Director-General for the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development from 1969 to 1973, as a representative of Kuwait and Arab Group of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (I.B.R.D), Washington D.C. from 1973 to 1975 and co-founded and chaired the Board of Directors of the Industrial Bank of Kuwait,^[5] he also served as Vice Chairman of the Association of Arab Economists.^[6] In 1980, he founded AlAlamiah Group with headquarters in Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and established Sakhr Software Company as a project to introduce the Arabic language into computers in 1982.^[4] Upon that, worked on the research and development of Arabic NLP (Natural Language Processing) which led to the development of the Arabic OCR, Arabic machine translation, and Arabic automatic speech recognition.^[7] In 1997, AlSharekh founded Book in a Newspaper project in collaboration with UNESCO.^[5] In 1987, he was one of the financiers of the Center for Arab Unity Studies and the Arab Organization for Translation, and the Institut du Monde Arabe in 1987.^[8] AlSharekh developed the first Quran computer software, in addition to the nine Hadith books software in English,^[9][4] the Islamic Information Archive,^[10] OCR in 1994, Arabic Text to Speech in 1998, Machine translation from and into Arabic in 2002,^[11][12] automatic speech translation in 2010^[13][14] and developing more than 90 educational and coding programs for the Arab youth.^[6]

Sakhr Software Company

In 1982, AlSharekh established Sakhr Software Company as a Kuwaiti subsidiary of AlAlamiah Group, which moved its headquarters to Cairo during the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.^[15] The company developed a new generation of Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques that were used in the development of automated morphology and automatic diacritizer which took over 10 years for completion.^[16] The company obtained three patents from the USPTO in the field of Arabic language for automatic pronunciation, automatic translation and OCR.^{[8][17][18][19]}

Contemporary Arabic Lexicon

Contemporary Arabic Lexicon is a contemporary computerized dictionary of the Arabic language, which was released online for free in 2019, contains 125,000 meanings and structures, as well as a database amounting to 35,000 synonyms and antonyms. The website also includes three dictionaries which are Al-Qāmus al-Muḥīṭ, Taj al-Arus and Lisān al-ʿArab.^[20][21]

AlSharekh Archives

The archive includes 250 magazines with 13 thousand issues that were issued from the late 19th century until 2010.^[21][22] Also includes more than a 250 thousand articles of various topics by 20 thousand writers from Arab and non-Arab countries.^[23][24][8]

Patents

During his tenure, Sakhr Software Company obtained three patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office:

• Arabic handwriting recognition using feature matching.^[17]
• Determining a compact model to transcribe the arabic language acoustically in a well defined basic phonetic study.^[19]
• Method and system for theme-based word sense ambiguity reduction.^[18]

Achievements and awards

• King Faisal International Prize — 2021^[7]
• State Prize, the National Council for Culture, Arts, and Letters (NCCAL) — 2018^[25]
• World Summit Awards — 2007^[9][26]
• E-Inclusion Award — 2007^[27]
• Outstanding Achievement Award in the field of Localization — 2005^[28]
• Foundation Pioneer Award — 2004^[29]
• E-Achievement Award E-Visionary of the Year, Arabian Business — 2002^[11][30]
• The best products award, Comdex's exhibition, Egypt — 1998^[4]
• Gulf Success Forum Award — 1996^[9]

Private holdings

AlSharekh has many private holdings that consisted of paintings from Arabian and Egyptian art by several well-known Arab and non-Arab artists, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Jarida, his art collection is sufficient to establish a private museum.^[31][32][33]

Published works

In 1968, AlSharekh published his first work Qais and Laila in the avant-garde sixties magazine Gallery^[34] and has three published short stories, Ten Stories published in 2006, Al-Saha published in 2012 and Secrets published in 2017, and a novel entitled The Family, published in 2018.^[21][35]

References

1. "الصفحة الرئيسية".
2. "AME Info: Middle East & Gulf News". www.ameinfo.com/.
3. ""صخر"... علامة التقنية العربية تعود للحاضر بتكريم عالمي". الشرق الأوسط (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
4. ""الشارخ" التكنولوجي العربي الذي لا يعرفه أحد". CNBC (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
5. "سمير عطا الله - قصص محمد الشارخ". الشرق الأوسط (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
6. "محمد بن عبد الرحمان الشارخ.... تعرف على الكويتي الفائز بجائزة الملك فيصل المرموقة". جريدة برواز الإلكترونية (in Arabic). 2021-03-02. Retrieved 2021-09-28.
7. "King Faisal Prize | Mr. Mohamed bin Abdulrahman Al-Sharekh". Retrieved 2021-09-28.
8. "محمد الشارخ.. العقل الذي كشف أسرار الكونية أمام اللغة العربية | مجلة الفيصل" (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
9. "محمد الشارخ المواطن الكويتي الذي أجبر الكمبيوتر على التحدث بلغتنا ضعف تدريس اللغة العربية يجعلها صعبة على الطلبة". alanba.com.kw (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
10. ""أرشيف الشارخ" للمجلات الأدبية والثقافية العربية في حلة جديدة". MEO (in Arabic). 2021-05-25. Retrieved 2021-09-28.
11. "تقديراً لانجازاته في مجال صناعة البرامج العربية، محمد الشارخ يفوز بجائزة «صاحب الرؤية الالكترونية» للعام 2002". www.albayan.ae (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-12.
12. "Al-jazirah". www.al-jazirah.com. Retrieved 2021-09-12.
13. "أعيدوا لنا الشارخ". alqabas.
14. . 2014-09-03. Archived from the original on 2014-09-03. Retrieved 2021-09-12.
15. "Sakhr launches Arabic ASR 4.0 speech recognition engine".
16. "شركة صخر الكويتية: أنجزنا المعجم الحديث وسنطلقه في يناير المقبل".
17. US 7142715, Fahmy, Hesham Osman Mahmoud & Elrayan, Samah Mohamed, "Arabic handwriting recognition using feature matching", published 2006-11-28, assigned to Sakhr Software Company 
18. US 7184948, Chalabi, Achraf, "Method and system for theme-based word sense ambiguity reduction", published 2007-02-27, assigned to Sakhr Software Company 
19. US 7107215, Ghali, Mikhail E., "Determining a compact model to transcribe the arabic language acoustically in a well defined basic phonetic study", published 2006-09-12, assigned to Sakhr Software Company 
20. ""صخر" تطرح المعجم الحديث في يناير المقبل". www.aljarida.com (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
21. المدني, بقلم: د عبدالله. "محمد الشارخ.. رائد تعريب الحوسبة". www.albayan.ae (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
22. "مجلات العقود الخوالي.. متاحة للباحثين". arb.majalla.com (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
23. "أرشيف المجلات الثقافية العربية.. كنز رقمي لثروة معرفية ورقية". العين الإخبارية (in Arabic). 2018-07-30. Retrieved 2021-09-28.
24. "حصاد : الشارخ يطلق نسخة جديدة من "أرشيف المجلات الثقافية والأدبية"". www.aljarida.com (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
25. "بالفيديو الفائزون بـ التقديرية والتشجيعية جائزة الدولة تقدير لعطاءاتنا". alanba.com.kw (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
26. "Sakhr wins UN Award for accessibility software".
27. "مؤسس شركة صخر ورئيس مجلس إدارتها يتسلم جائزة القمة العالمية لمجتمع المعلومات". archive.aawsat.com. Retrieved 2021-09-28.
28. "بعد فوز شركة صخر بجائزة القمة العالمية لمجتمع المعلومات الشارخ يفوز بجائزة تقديرية ضمن جوائز التقنية العربية". جريدة القبس. Retrieved 2021-09-28.
29. "محمد الشارخ يتسلم جائزة الرواد من مؤسسة الفكر العربي". صحيفة الوسط البحرينية (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
30. "محمد الشارخ مؤسس شركة صخر العالمية يفوز بجائزة "صاحب الرؤية الإلكترونية" للعام 2002". alriyadh.com. 2016-03-04. from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2021-09-28.
31. "مجموعة الشارخ الفنية".
32. "مجلة العربي تحتفي بالمرأة المبدعة". www.aljarida.com (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
33. "عن محمد الشارخ الظالم نفسه". www.aljarida.com (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.
34. "الشارخ يجنح إلى المفارقة والمفاجأة في أسرار وقصص أخرى". aljarida.com. Retrieved 2021-09-28.
35. "أسرار وقصص أخرى مجموعة قصصية جديدة للكاتب محمد الشارخ". alanba.com.kw (in Arabic). Retrieved 2021-09-28.