- [Abdullah] From the day I was born to 2007,
I was living in Iraq. It was a turbulent time.
My school was hit from like bombings.
I've had loads of time where I had no education.
My parents didn't see a future in that type of education.
So they wanted to move somewhere where
the education would be consistent.
They first think of education and then everything else.
Before coming to Canada, their main concern was
which country would offer the best
tertiary education to our children.
When I asked my parents, the first advice
they told me is keep doing well in school,
and then the careers that you want, would come to you.
I started working with a few professors
and I found machine learning and I decided, oh,
this is something I actually want to pursue.
Luckily from all the universities that I applied to,
I got my acceptances. And then I,
it was just a matter of comparison
and Guelph was on top of the list,
and then the more I researched into Guelph,
the more it appealed to me.
- When I first met Abdullah when he must've been
in his very first week here.
During our orientation week in engineering,
we do a it's called meetings for majors,
where we have a few faculty come and speak to the incoming
class of biological and biomedical engineering students.
I did a little spiel on some of the research that I was
doing at the time, he approached me afterwards,
he was really interested and very first day,
asked about volunteer opportunities in my lab.
You don't normally get quite that much enthusiasm
from brand new first year students,
but that is typical as I've learned
over the years of Abdullah.
- I was just scrolling by one day
and then I found a post complaining about
bad infrastructure in schools.
- Or sending the students out
to different cities or overcrowding existing schools
I helped with managing a campaign
that would gather donations.
And then with the amount of money that we raised
was around $2,000 US.
- I wanted to pay back because
I know how fortunate education is fundamental
to anything you do. The University of Guelph
is very important to me, and I think it's shaped
me personally because you learn new things
and you build connections which led me
to have great opportunities.
The decision to stay on my masters project was the
flexibility and the amount of opportunities.
I had offers from several universities,
but no other university offered me as good of an
opportunity as Guelph.
- [Eran] The first time I met Abdullah was at design three.
I remember Abdullah very well,
because the way he asked questions with
such enthusiastic voice.
- He laid out a few projects that he was working on.
And I just mentioned prostate cancer,
if he has any projects related to that,
because that was why my grandfather died of.
I felt an obligation to do something in
that field to hopefully help the science advance.
- What impresses most about Abdullah
is his initiative. I told him that I had a large group,
so I was running out of funding.
So Abdullah initiated this industry collaborations.
And in total, his initiatives helped me
in bringing up about $80,000 worth of industry,
plus my tax funding, to my research team.
- He offered me a project where
I would be detecting the quality of prostate MRI scans
automatically within like 30 seconds or one hour out of a
one hour to an hour and a half sequence of scans.
- In his work one of the problems is that
some of those images that are acquired are of poor quality,
so they will need to follow up again.
So then they will need to be rescanned.
- And if it was to be caught in stage one,
it would be curable and will be treatable.
- So Abdullah will develop AI technologies
to predict the quality of the images before they acquired.
- And AI would help in detecting that cancer.
And it will be universal throughout.
My ultimate hope in completing this research project
is to improve the state of cancer detection as a whole.
(piano music)