History

Kuwait University was established in October 1966, five years after Kuwait became an independent state. It started with the Colleges of Science, Arts and Education, and a women's college, with 418 students on roll and 31 faculty members. By 1999/2000, the students strength increased to 19,001 with a proportionate increase in faculty that reached 1,042. Despite this expansion, the university budget, which was KD 117,111,000 KD for the fiscal year 1998/1999, declined to KD 106,689,000, illustrating the administrative care in maintaining institutional developmental momentum while preserving resources and ensuring rational and optimum utilization of available funds and facilities.

The institutional expansion continued alongside, and within an year of its establishment three additional Colleges of Law, Shari'a, Commerce, Economics and Political Science were inaugurated following the issuance of the Amiri Decree on April 1, 1967. Subsequent Amiri Decrees led to intense institutional development throughout this period resulting in establishing the Colleges of Medicine in 1973, Engineering and Petroleum in 1974, Pharmacy in 1996, Social Sciences in 1998, Dentistry in 1996, and inaugurating the Colleges of Graduate Studies in 1977, Education in 1980.

Presently, Kuwait University offers 65 academic programmes through its 12 colleges. The number of registered students has already reached 18,436 in undergraduate programmes, with additional 565 students pursuing graduate studies. By 1999/2000, the university had 2,914 alumni.

Course overview

This course is offered once every semester with around 25-30 students per semester and is designed for senior level students in computer engineering. It gives them exposure to new and advanced topics in software or hardware systems. Topics are decided by the instructor.

It is the capstone design course and usually the topics are related to new technologies available in the market. I usually offer topics in mobile computing, location based services and mobile databases. I also teach advanced topics in the same area as graduate courses in both computer engineering masters program and information technologies masters program. I have been using Windows CE as a test-bed platform for my projects and systems and would like to export and expand the work to different platforms such as Palm and Symbian OS.

University members engaged with Symbian

Dr. Ali Dashti and Dr. Sami Habib