I'm an engineer who likes doing creative things. I enjoy the things that put a smile on people's face whether it's useful or just entertaining.
Ebrahim Ephrem Karam
ebrahim.karam@gmail.com
ebrahim_karam@hotmail.com
Master of Entertainment Technology • May 2022
The program focuses on developing products that captivate your audience. They help you develop your interdisciplinary communication skills and team building as you develop prototypes/products.
In one specific course(Building virtual worlds-BVW), you make 5 different games with in 2 weeks sprints with different people each time. I took the role of sound designer.
Bachelor of Engineering In Electrical & Computer Engineering
Minor in Mathematics and Biomedical Engineering • July 2017
I have a 84.43/100 or a 3.56/4.0 GPA. In my four years I have taken courses in the following fields.
| Algorithms | Control | Electronics |
| Robotics | Industrial Engineering | Instrumentation |
| General Biology | Physiology | Psychology |
| Screen Writing | Short Film Making | Audio Engineering |
I have also participated in numerous Clubs and Societies such as the AUB Ciné Club, AUB Plus, AUB Biomedical Engineering Society, & AUB Astronomy Club.
High School Diploma • June 2013
Graduated with honors from the General Sciences section. I was top 20% of my class and participated in activities such as O-MUN, Drama Club, Choir, and the varsity track team.
Software Engineer • July 2022 - July 2024
I'm developing and maintaining mostly interactives which is basically anything with a screeen that interacts with an audience. These range from allowing guests to fly their own alien creature to alolowing them to see themselves as a mystical creature
What I do:
● Build and maintain interactives
● Be the boots on the ground during an install whether remote or live
● Have built HMIs to help maintain Animatornics in Theme parks and exhibits. HMIs were built in C# and Perspective Ignition
● Have Developed software to control Animatronics in Structured Text on Beckhoff PLCs
● Have Integrated our Animatronics with Various Show Control Systems
Concept Designer and Rapid Prototyper • May 2022 - July 2022
I was working under John Balash on improvements and new concepts for the Jam-O-Drum. I was specifically part of the CMU ETC Outreach and Engagement Team
What I did:
● Took dimensions of the current Jam-O-Drum and put them into SolidWorks
● Looked at the current limitations of the current design
● Researched materials and technology that could solve the limitations
● Build and Designed some Colorize Activity boxes
● Helped showcase The Colorize project at the Warhol Museum
Research Engineer • October 2017 - December 2020
The lab aims to check the side effects in consumer products that give an inhalable aerosol such as ecigs, cigarettes, Water pipe (HOOKAHs), etc
● Develop and Build Instruments that measure users’ puffing behaviors
● Understand the electrical functionality of new electronic cigarettes.
● Technical support in the lab
● Implemented the Infrastructure for MSFEA Air pollution Observatory
Software Engineer Intern • June 2017 - August 2017
NAR is a startup that provides drone solutions. I was giving aid in their Raven AI project. The project aims to simply the petrolling process of oil and gas pipelines.
I took on the following tasks
● Integrated GPS into the platform
● Worked on the aesthetics and design of the generated report, which were written in HTML 5 and CSS3.
● Created an interactive map using Google maps API ,which allowed the users to see the obscurities, Flightpath, and pipeline path in a very dynamic way.
Technical Support and Research Assistant • June 2016 - July 2016
The internship was provided by the IAESTE organization. I was under the supervision and administration of Dr. Albert Diaz-Guilera. I was helping out with the ”Xarxes de col·laboració a la UB” which generates 3D graphs of professors at the university. A node represents the professor, and links between nodes represent if the professors have co-authored. During this internship, I had familiarized myself with Apache servers, Linux, Python, HTML, CSS, and graph theory.
I tackled the following objectives
● Maintained the Server on which the WebApp for the project ran on.
● Improved Python scripts for post- Doctorates under Dr. Albert
Work Study Student• September 2015 - February 2017
The communication office is in charge of events held by the university. The Department deals with the University's Alumni and distinguished guests. The office takes charge of the annual opening ceremony and commencement for example.
My task and objectives included the following
● Ushered Guests
● Dealing with requests and complaints
● Crowd Control
● Guidance and Assistance
SWMP Coordinator Intern• August 2015
BBSO is an NGO that rose during the garbage crisis in Lebanon. The organization was to provide a sustainable and ecological solution for Baskinta & its suburbs. I was the solid waste management program coordinator.
● Keep records on the amount of waste collected
● Collected Data & Statistics to improve the service for the community
● Contacted potential buyers and collectors
● Represented BBSO in conferences and events
This is my current skill set and a graphical representation of each. Please note that not all my skill sets are represented below.
Other tools include AutoCad, Sketchup, Microsoft Office, Eagle, Brackets, Protools, Reaper, and Audacity
This was the final project for the course Robotics for creative practice. It was a team of two and we decided to make a zeotrope that could fit in suitcase. I was responsible for the electronics and the programming. Please feel free to read the final report on the project You can see how this was iterated on via the youtube playlist here Zeotrope, Art Piece, Illusion
This was a student pitched project as part of CMU ETC. The aim of the project was to make augment Zoom for the virtual/remote classroom and provide features that. I was one of the main programmers and designers on the team. This was project that had a lot of hurdles but I was super lucky to have the team that I had. Feel free to check the tech challenges here. The code is open-source and you can check it out here Education, Human Centered Design, Zoom
A system that was put in place while I was full time in the Aerosol lab. The system logs the PM 10 and PM 2.5 of the atmosphere at AUB and publishes the data to the AUB website. Real-time Monitor, Hardware, Server
An application that was developed during Beirut Startup Weekend 2017. The team won First Place
Chatbot, Hackathon
I contributed to a website that showed the location of all Lebanese protests in the country and abroad. The site was developed by Lebanese expats.
Web Development
An application that came into development thanks to the MIT Media Lab RLA program. This project was tested and validated with the help of the NGO SAWA for Aid and Development
App Development, User Testing and validation
This project helps identify the different Bus Routes in Lebanon. In order to increase contributions and exposure, the project was forked into Lebanese Developers Community and Facebook Developer Circle: Beirut
Transportation
The Map shows the different Governorates, Districts and Villages in Lebanon along with their names in Arabic and Latin. This project would hopefully allow other developers to show their data on a Lebanese map and make data visualization easier.
District Map
The idea was an attempt to solve the public transportation problem in Lebanon. It was part of the OurMena hackathon in 2017. You can watch the pitch live on the 38:23 mark on the following Facebook video. We were lucky enough to win First Place for the idea.
Ideation
We tackled UNDP’s Accelerator Lab challenge to improve access to governmental anti-corruption documents.What we have produced is a chatbot on Facebook Messenger that will explain the content of the documents in an interactive and easy-to-digest format, as well as providing links to the original documents. More than just a filing system for the documents themselves, it can be an important pillar of a communications campaign to inform the public about issues that may affect their lives. The project might also be developed into an interactive platform to be more scalable. You can read more about the project on this Google Doc.
Chatbot, Social, Anti-corruption
Out of curiosity I wanted to know how many engineers were registered in each category in the Order of Engineers in Lebanon. The website had a directory which made this data publicly accessible. I got the data and was able to answer questions like which is the most popular engineering major in Lebanon and other concerns. This data was shared with the AUB Mind group. You can read more about the project from the README file.
Data Analysis, Web Scraping, "Big" Data
