Google Honours Digital Pioneer Dr. Nabil Ali Mohamed

Today's Google Doodle celebrates the 82nd birthday of Egyptian digital pioneer Dr. Nabil Ali Mohamed, who created programs that allowed computers to understand Arabic text.

Born in Cairo in 1938, Nabil Ali graduated from Cairo University with a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering and proceeded to work with the Egyptian Air Force and many computer companies around the world for the next two decades. His interests in the arts fuelled his passion for engineering, and the two fields found each other in computational linguistics.

Nabil Ali was awarded the King Faisal award in 2012 due to his achievements in Arabic Language and Literature.  The digitization of the Arabic language was a herculean pursuit, on account of the complexities of the language with its particular morphology and linguistic rules. And in reaching that pursuit to its end, Nabil Ali was able to bridge Arabic-speaking society with the rest of the world.