A growing number of nanotechnology research, education and industry initiatives have been recently launched by several Arab States to quickly build scientific capacity and track the worldwide developments in nanotechnology. Some countries, namely the oil rich States, have allocated large funds to support these initiatives. This comprehensive commitment is intended to serve national interests in energy, water and food supply, medicine, and local industry. Other Arab States are also pursuing nanotechnology, however with fewer funds and more human resources. This study assesses current status and prospects of nanotechnology in the Arab Republic of Egypt, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, State of Kuwait, State of Qatar, and United Arab Emirates. The study is aimed at having an overview of the status of existing, underdevelopment, and planed educational and research programs as well as commercial establishments relevant to nanotechnology. The overview also includes nanotechnology research focus areas, needs, challenges, and opportunities. BACKGROUNDThe Arab World consists of 22 countries covering about 10% of the world's land and is home to about 300 million representing 4.5% of the world's population. The UNESCO Science Report 3 groups the Arab States into three groups in terms of per capita income. The first group is characterized by almost total economic dependence on oil (Bahrain, Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi), with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita income being highest in Qatar and lowest in Oman. Around 11% of the Arab population belongs to this group of States. The higher education systems and science, technology and innovation (STI) in these States are new but developing rapidly thanks to sizeable investments by their heads of State and governments. The second group encompasses Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Libyan, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia. Here, GDP per capita is highest in the Libyan and lowest in Egypt. Although the States in this category have modest oil reserves, with the notable exception of Iraq and Libyan, they possess relatively mature higher education infrastructure including some of the oldest universities in the Arab World. The population of this group amounts to around 70% of the population in the Arab World. The third group is characterized by limited or underdeveloped natural resources and an equally small supply of trained human resources. States in this group also possess some of the lowest GDP per capita in the world, which classifies them as least developed countries. They are Comoros, Djibouti, Mauritania, Sudan and Yemen. This group of countries represents around 19% of the total population of the Arab World.According to Sawahel 4 , on average, Arab States allocate less than 0.2% of their GDP on research compared to 1. 6% in East Asia countries and 2.6% in developed countries. However, the budget allocated for purchasing armament in these States surpasses health, education, and research budgets combined. Nevertheless, in recent years the Arab leaders recognized the...

People with communication impairment need an alternative communication channel to complete daily activities. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems can help provide a communication medium to support such users. The involvement of speech and language pathologists (SLPs) who work in rehabilitation centers can help develop better solutions. This paper presents the development of an AAC tablet application that uses pictures on the screen and voice feedback to help children with language impairment improve the efficiency in their communication. The proposed solution maps the sentences commonly used by children into appealing symbols. The children can use these symbols instead of constructing sentences from scratch, as done by most of the previously proposed solutions in the literature. The application was evaluated by SLPs on six children with language impairment. This research presents a design methodology when providing such a solution for touch screen devices for people with language impairment. A set of accessibility guidelines is proposed for AAC computer-based solutions, which can help researchers and practitioners. The obtained results prove that the proposed system improves the children’s stimulation to communicate and decreases communication time. Such a solution can assist therapists as a resource to improve their patients’ communication.

The current paper presents the development and the evaluation of an Arabic application (app) for electronic stories (eStories) that can be used as an assistive tool in the rehabilitation of children with social communication difficulties. The development process involved engineers and researchers and speech and language pathologists (SLPs) from a rehabilitation hospital, who formulated the design methodology of the Arabic app. This process is critical when designing tools for children with communication difficulties since they have a wide range of differences in their abilities. The evaluation of the app from the standpoint of the SLPs at a local school suggests that the app is easy to use, and the involvement of these SLPs helped in developing a better solution. The results of the usability study on twenty-five students showed positive evaluation with an average score that signifies that the app has above-average usability. This paper highlights the importance of the evaluation process in catering the app for successful user experience.