00:00

- [Abdullah] From the day I was born to 2007,

00:03

I was living in Iraq. It was a turbulent time.

00:07

My school was hit from like bombings.

00:14

I've had loads of time where I had no education.

00:21

My parents didn't see a future in that type of education.

00:24

So they wanted to move somewhere where

00:25

the education would be consistent.

00:27

They first think of education and then everything else.

00:36

Before coming to Canada, their main concern was

00:38

which country would offer the best

00:40

tertiary education to our children.

00:42

When I asked my parents, the first advice

00:44

they told me is keep doing well in school,

00:47

and then the careers that you want, would come to you.

00:50

I started working with a few professors

00:53

and I found machine learning and I decided, oh,

00:55

this is something I actually want to pursue.

00:58

Luckily from all the universities that I applied to,

01:00

I got my acceptances. And then I,

01:02

it was just a matter of comparison

01:04

and Guelph was on top of the list,

01:06

and then the more I researched into Guelph,

01:08

the more it appealed to me.

01:10

- When I first met Abdullah when he must've been

01:13

in his very first week here.

01:14

During our orientation week in engineering,

01:17

we do a it's called meetings for majors,

01:20

where we have a few faculty come and speak to the incoming

01:24

class of biological and biomedical engineering students.

01:28

I did a little spiel on some of the research that I was

01:30

doing at the time, he approached me afterwards,

01:33

he was really interested and very first day,

01:36

asked about volunteer opportunities in my lab.

01:39

You don't normally get quite that much enthusiasm

01:42

from brand new first year students,

01:44

but that is typical as I've learned

01:46

over the years of Abdullah.

01:54

- I was just scrolling by one day

01:56

and then I found a post complaining about

01:58

bad infrastructure in schools.

02:29

- Or sending the students out

02:31

to different cities or overcrowding existing schools

02:38

I helped with managing a campaign

02:41

that would gather donations.

02:43

And then with the amount of money that we raised

02:45

was around $2,000 US.

03:10

- I wanted to pay back because

03:13

I know how fortunate education is fundamental

03:15

to anything you do. The University of Guelph

03:18

is very important to me, and I think it's shaped

03:20

me personally because you learn new things

03:23

and you build connections which led me

03:24

to have great opportunities.

03:27

The decision to stay on my masters project was the

03:29

flexibility and the amount of opportunities.

03:32

I had offers from several universities,

03:33

but no other university offered me as good of an

03:36

opportunity as Guelph.

03:38

- [Eran] The first time I met Abdullah was at design three.

03:44

I remember Abdullah very well,

03:45

because the way he asked questions with

03:47

such enthusiastic voice.

03:50

- He laid out a few projects that he was working on.

03:53

And I just mentioned prostate cancer,

03:55

if he has any projects related to that,

03:57

because that was why my grandfather died of.

04:00

I felt an obligation to do something in

04:02

that field to hopefully help the science advance.

04:05

- What impresses most about Abdullah

04:08

is his initiative. I told him that I had a large group,

04:12

so I was running out of funding.

04:15

So Abdullah initiated this industry collaborations.

04:19

And in total, his initiatives helped me

04:22

in bringing up about $80,000 worth of industry,

04:26

plus my tax funding, to my research team.

04:29

- He offered me a project where

04:31

I would be detecting the quality of prostate MRI scans

04:35

automatically within like 30 seconds or one hour out of a

04:38

one hour to an hour and a half sequence of scans.

04:41

- In his work one of the problems is that

04:44

some of those images that are acquired are of poor quality,

04:48

so they will need to follow up again.

04:51

So then they will need to be rescanned.

04:54

- And if it was to be caught in stage one,

04:56

it would be curable and will be treatable.

05:00

- So Abdullah will develop AI technologies

05:02

to predict the quality of the images before they acquired.

05:07

- And AI would help in detecting that cancer.

05:11

And it will be universal throughout.

05:13

My ultimate hope in completing this research project

05:15

is to improve the state of cancer detection as a whole.

05:20

(piano music)