​The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Balamand (UOB) is pleased to announce that Computer Engineering students Joseph Jbeily and Jean-Pierre Gergie have completed a two months internship at the HumanTech Institute in Fribourg, Switzerland. The students were supervised throughout the training by Dr. Walid karam from UOB, Dr.  Mira Kamali (UOB Alumna), and Dr. Marinne Capelli from HumanTech Institute.

During their international internship, Joseph and Jean-Pierre created an intelligent Chabot named Sasha, which can replace instructors when they are not available or absent to answer students’ questions and even schedule meetings. 

To create Sasha, both Joseph and Jean-Pierre used Unity and Microsoft Azure frameworks. At the end of the internship, they gave a presentation on their accomplishments, which academics and students from UOB and HumanTech Institute attended. In the phase of the project, it is envisaged to integrate this intelligent bot with Google teams or Zoom. 

This is the second collaboration between UOB and HumanTech institute; the first was through graduate engineering students Elissa Nabhan (Electrical Engineering) and Hanna Abed el Massih (Computer Engineering) who completed jointly supervised theses further developing the work they had done in their internships at the HumanTech Institute. 

The HumanTech Institute aims to carry out research in specific and transversal fields at the intersection of technological sciences, economics and human sciences. Typically, the focus of the internships is adopting and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) research in applications to the center’s fields of interest. 

Dr. Walid Karam, who supervised the internship from the UOB side, underlined: “Exposing our graduating students to research labs and European funded projects is a great opportunity for both students and our university. I’m very grateful for this collaboration to the HumanTech Institute at HEIA Fribourg, and our alumna Mira Kamali who is currently completing her AI PhD studies at the Swiss Institute.”

In turn, Vice President for Internationalization and Engagement and the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering Prof. Rami Abboud commended Joseph and Jean-Pierre on their work and thanked the efforts of Dr. Karam and Ms. Kamali in this respect. He emphasized that such collaboration especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence provides our students with a unique experience for learning and professional development especially as UOB plans to make great steps in advancing its curricula and research in artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, and their applications.