Talk Abstract: 
We present a novel data based approach to solve what seems to be an analytically intractable problem: which research areas/subject should a country invest in to ensure long-term economic growth. Said an other way, if a country wants to be rich should it just invest in engineering and science related to pics or is there a positive effect on the economy by investing in unrelated topics like History and the Arts. In this talk we present an approach based on the Product Maps and Complexity of Hidalgo et al that uses academic publication data to develop numerical measures of subject relatedness and complexity, directly relate it to economic growth and finally allow a precise answer the policy question: “What precise subjects should a country invest to maximize future growth?”. 

Speaker Bio: 
Ahmad (Kareem) AlAbdulkareem is a PhD Student in Computational Science & Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he is also a Research Associate at the Center for Complex Engineering Systems (CCES) at KACST and MIT. He graduated at the top of his class in 2010 from KSU with a BSc in Computer Science and his graduation project “Bmail: Brain Controlled Email Client” won several awards. In 2012 Kareem continued to receive a Master’s of Science with honors from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in computer science in both High Performance Computing (HPC) and Computer Systems.

During his study at KAUST, he was a researcher in the Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group working on enhancing classification algorithms (specifically Support Vector Machines).

Kareem’s interests include Data Science, Machine Learning, Graph Theory & Network analysis, Data Mining, Information Retrieval, Complex modeling and simulation, and Game Theory