Walid’s main research expertise is in information retrieval and a bit of natural language processing and machine learning. At QCRI, he mainly focuses on social search and analysis, with special focus on Arabic social media. He works on improving the retrieval effectiveness of searching microblogs, such as Twitter, and creating products that utilize the large amount of information and knowledge in social data.

Walid received his PhD from Dublin City University in Ireland in Jan 2012 in the field of information retrieval. His PhD topic was improving the retrieval effectiveness of recall-oriented IR applications, such as patent search. Walid also received his MSc degree from Cairo University in 2008 with the topic of searching degraded text and correcting errors in OCR text for Arabic. Walid also worked in IBM Egypt then Microsoft Egypt as a research engineer following graduation and before he left for his PhD studies.

• PhD student / Teaching Assistant, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland, 2008 –2012
• Research Software Development Engineer, Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center, Smart Village, Egypt, 2007 - 2008
• Research Engineer, Human Language Technologies Group, IBM Technology Development Center, Egypt, 2005 - 2007

• Reviewer in journals: ACM TOIS Journal and World Patent Information – Elsevier Journal
• Reviewer in conferences: IRFC 2012, ACM CIKM 2011, and IJCNLP 2011
• Organizer of the CLEF-IP track 2012

• OssamaEmam and Walid Magdy. A Word Formation Method and System. Filed by IBM in January 2008 in US Patent Office (US20080300861)
• Walid Magdy and Motaz El-Saban. Using an ID Domain to Improve Searching. Filed by Microsoft in July 2008 in US Patent Office and Issued in March 2012 (US8131720)
• Walid Magdy and Motaz El-Saban. Personalized Event Notification Using Real-Time Video Analysis. Filed by Microsoft in March 2008 in US Patent Office (US20090249387)
• Walid Magdy and Gareth Jones. A Method of and a System for Retrieving Information. Filed by Dublin City University in January 2011 in the US Patent Office (US20120185496)
• Walid Magdy. A System and Method for Automatic Generation of a Reference Utility. Filed by QF as an International Patent Applications in June 2012 (EP2012/062269)
• Walid Magdy, Ahmed Ali, and Kareem Darwish. A System and Method for Automatic Generation of Information-Rich Content from Multiple Microblogs, each Microblog Containing only Sparse Information. Filed by QF as an International Patent Application in August 2012 (EP2012/065367)
• Walid Magdy. A System and Method for the Automatic Creation or Augmentation of an Electronically Rendered Publication Document. Filed by QF as an International Patent Application in September 2012 (EP2012/069140)

• PhD, Dublin City University, 2012
• MSc, Cairo University, 2008
• BSc, Cairo University, 2005

• Magdy W., A. Ali, K. Darwish. A Summarization Tool for Time-Sensitive Social Media. CIKM 2012
• Darwish K., W. Magdy, A. Mourad. Language Processing for Arabic Microblog Retrieval. CIKM 2012
• Eskevich M., W. Magdy, and G. J. F. Jones. New Metrics for Meaningful Evaluation of Informally Structured Speech Retrieval. ECIR 2012 link
• Magdy W. and G. J. F. Jones. An Efficient Method for Using Machine Translation Technologies in Cross-Language Patent Search. CIKM 2011 link
• Leveling J., W. Magdy, and G. J. F. Jones. An Investigation of Decompounding for Cross-Language Patent Search. SIGIR 2011 link
• Magdy W. and G. J. F. Jones. PRES: A Score Metric for Evaluating Recall-Oriented Information Retrieval Applications. SIGIR 2010 link
• Magdy W. and K. Darwish. Effect of OCR Error Correction on Arabic Retrieval. Springer, Information Retrieval, 2008 link
• Darwish K. and W. Magdy. Error Correction vs. Query Garbling for Arabic OCR Document Retrieval. ACM TOIS, volume 26, 2007 link
• Magdy W. and K. Darwish. Arabic OCR Error Correction Using Character Segment Correction, Language Modeling, and Shallow Morphology. EMNLP 2006 link