Charaf Mohamed Al Nour

Egypt

On the night of October 31, 2019, ministers and members of the People’s Assembly applauded Charaf Mohamad Al Nour for serving for more than 20 years as the general manager of the Counterfeit and Forgery Research Administration within the Department of Forensic Medicine of the Egyptian Ministry of Justice.

Soon after, at the age of 55, Charaf embarked on an all new adventure. Years of manually vetting forensic reports to ensure that they are legal and free of any mistakes had become extremely difficult for him.

Charaf says: “When I watched some documentaries about artificial intelligence, I said to myself, could I not implement this in my work? I thought it was an impossible task. One day, while I was browsing Facebook, I watched a friend sharing a video clip of a man of almost the same age as me, saying that anyone can learn coding for free, in an easy way, and more importantly, in Arabic. After watching him, I said to myself I will do this. I will learn to code!”

Then, Charaf began coming up with dozens of different excuses to borrow his children’s laptops. He says: “I wasn’t honest with them to avoid feeling embarrassed. In fact, the first lesson I took was like taking Chinese, which I obviously don’t know, and that only increased my determination to learn. The man who appeared in the video clip was the same age as me, and he was not different from me in anything, so how can I not be able to manage to learn?!”

Charaf eventually passed the data analysis course with excellence, then pursued another course on artificial intelligence. It was hard work, which is “the whole point” as Bait Alkasseid says. Charaf has broken age barriers after winning the program “Checking Manual Signatures Using Artificial Intelligence”.