KUWAIT: The National Council for Culture, Arts, and Letters (NCCAL) mourned Wednesday Kuwaiti software entrepreneur Mohammad Abdulrahman Al-Sharekh, who introduced the first Arabic-language operating system into computers. Al-Sharekh died earlier today, at the age of 82. In a press statement issued by the NCCAL Secretariat, the NCCAL Chairman and Minister of Information and Culture Abdulrahman Al-Mutairi and the NCCAL officials and employees extended sincere condolences to Al-Sharekh’s family.

Al-Sharekh was the founder and chairman emeritus of Sakhr Software Company. Through his company, he developed a new generation of Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques that were used in the development of automated morphology and automatic diacritizers.

His company obtained three patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office in the field of Arabic language for automatic pronunciation, automatic translation, and optical character recognition. He won several Kuwaiti and international awards and prizes, including the Outstanding Achievement Award in the field of localization in 2005, the World Summit Award in 2007, Kuwait’s State Prize in 2018, and the Saudi King Faisal International Prize in 2021. — KUNA