Mohammed AlSharekh

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]

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]

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]

• 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]

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]

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]