Reem Ali Alghamdi

PhD student, Computer Science

Hello :) I am a Computer Science PhD student at the High-Performance Visualization Group, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. My advisor is Professor Markus Hadwiger. My research interests are Astrophysics Visualization, High Performance Computing, Scientific Visualization, and GPU Programming.

Publications

Lactea: Web-Based Spectrum-Preserving Multi-Resolution Visualization of the GAIA Star Catalog

Reem Alghamdi, Markus Hadwiger, Guido Reina, Alberto Jaspe-Villanueva

Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings Eurographics/IEEE Symposium on Visualization, Eurovis 2025), 2025

Abs Bib PDF Supp Video Website

The explosion of data in astronomy has resulted in an era of unprecedented opportunities for discovery. The GAIA mission’s catalog, containing a large number of light sources (mostly stars) with several parameters such as sky position and proper motion, is playing a significant role in advancing astronomy research and has been crucial in various scientific breakthroughs over the past decade. In its current release, more than 200 million stars contain a calibrated continuous spectrum, which is essential for characterizing astronomical information such as effective temperature and surface gravity, and enabling complex tasks like interstellar extinction detection and narrow-band filtering. Even though numerous studies have been conducted to visualize and analyze the data in the SciVis and AstroVis communities, no work has attempted to leverage spectral information for visualization in real-time. Interactive exploration of such complex, massive data presents several challenges for visualization. This paper introduces a novel multi-resolution, spectrum-preserving data structure and a progressive, real-time visualization algorithm to handle the sheer volume of the data efficiently, enabling interactive visualization and exploration of the whole catalog’s spectra. We show the efficiency of our method with our open-source, interactive, web-based tool for exploring the GAIA catalog, and discuss astronomically relevant use cases of our system.
@article{alghamdi2025Lactea, title = {Lactea: Web-Based Spectrum-Preserving Multi-Resolution Visualization of the GAIA Star Catalog}, author = {Alghamdi, Reem and Hadwiger, Markus and Reina, Guido and Jaspe-Villanueva, Alberto}, journal = {Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings Eurographics/IEEE Symposium on Visualization, Eurovis 2025)}, volume = {44}, number = {3}, pages = {to appear}, year = {2025}, }
Doppler Volume Rendering: A Dynamic, Piecewise Linear Spectral Representation for Visualizing Astrophysics

Reem Alghamdi, Thomas Müller, Alberto Jaspe-Villanueva, Markus Hadwiger, Filip Sadlo

Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings Eurographics/IEEE Symposium on Visualization, Eurovis 2023), 2023

Abs Bib PDF Supp Video Website

We present a novel approach for rendering volumetric data including the Doppler effect of light, which is crucial for the case of very high velocities of the matter that is emitting light. Similar to the acoustic Doppler effect, which is caused by the relative movement between a sound emitter and an observer, light waves as electromagnetic radiation also experience a compression or expansion when the light emitter and an observer move relative to one another. To take this effect into account, we employ spectral volume rendering in an emission/absorption model, with voxels emitting and attenuating light at different wavelengths. Our approach enables accurate computation of the Doppler effect of light in realtime volume rendering, with relative motion provided by an additional 3D velocity vector field. In particular, we propose a new representation for light spectra that uses a dynamic set of piecewise linear basis functions, tailored to accurate and efficient evaluation of the Doppler effect in volume rendering. Our basis functions are used during light accumulation along viewing rays to achieve higher efficiency and accuracy compared to point-based spectral representations. Our method is particularly useful for analyzing astrophysical simulations.
@article{alghamdi-etal-2023-doppler, title = {Doppler Volume Rendering: A Dynamic, Piecewise Linear Spectral Representation for Visualizing Astrophysics}, author = {Alghamdi, Reem and Müller, Thomas and Jaspe-Villanueva, Alberto and Hadwiger, Markus and Sadlo, Filip}, journal = {Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings Eurographics/IEEE Symposium on Visualization, Eurovis 2023)}, volume = {42}, number = {3}, pages = {to appear}, year = {2023}, }
ArMATH
ArMATH: a Dataset for Solving Arabic Math Word Problems

Reem Alghamdi, Zhenwen Liang, Xiangliang Zhang

In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Jun 2022

Abs Bib PDF Code Website

This paper studies solving Arabic Math Word Problems by deep learning. A Math Word Problem (MWP) is a text description of a mathematical problem that can be solved by deriving a math equation to reach the answer. Effective models have been developed for solving MWPs in English and Chinese. However, Arabic MWPs are rarely studied. This paper contributes the first large-scale dataset for Arabic MWPs, which contains 6,000 samples of primary-school math problems, written in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Arabic MWP solvers are then built with deep learning models and evaluated on this dataset. In addition, a transfer learning model is built to let the high-resource Chinese MWP solver promote the performance of the low-resource Arabic MWP solver. This work is the first to use deep learning methods to solve Arabic MWP and the first to use transfer learning to solve MWP across different languages. The transfer learning enhanced solver has an accuracy of 74.15%, which is 3% higher than the solver without using transfer learning. We make the dataset and solvers available in public for encouraging more research of Arabic MWPs: https://github.com/reem-codes/ArMATH
@inproceedings{alghamdi-etal-2022-armath, title = {{A}r{MATH}: a Dataset for Solving {A}rabic Math Word Problems}, author = {Alghamdi, Reem and Liang, Zhenwen and Zhang, Xiangliang}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference}, month = jun, year = {2022}, address = {Marseille, France}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.37}, pages = {351--362} }

Research Experience

2022 - Present
Graduate Student Researcher

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
- Advisor: Professor Markus Hadwiger
- Reseach focus: Visualization in Astrophysics, High Performance Computing, Scientific Visualization, GPU Programming
2024 - 2024

Visiting Researcher

Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden
2021 - 2021
Graduate Student Researcher

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
- Advisor: Professor Xiangliang Zhang
- Reseach focus: Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Transfer Learning, Math Word Problems

Mentoring And Teaching Experience

2025 - 2025
Teaching Assistant - KAUST MEngg in AI

Ministry of Interior, Saudi Arabia
- I worked as a TA for The Applied Data Analytics course
2021 - 2025
Graduate Courses Teaching Assistant

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
- CS380 - GPU and GPGPU Programming
- CS247 - Scientific Visualization
- CS220 - Data Analytics
- CS207 - Programming Methodology and Abstractions
- CS201 - Introduction to Programming with Python
- I worked as a TA for multiple courses. Responsibilities included writing homeworks and tests, grading, recitation sessions, one-on-one student support
2025 - 2025
Instructor - AI Specialization

KAUST Academy, Saudi Arabia
- Introduction to Artificial Intelligence: Taught students machine learning concepts such as linear regression, logistic regression and an introduction to deep learning.
2022 - 2023
Teaching Assistant - KAUST MS in Data Science and Analytics

ARAMCO, Saudi Arabia
- Information Visualization and Visual Analytics: InfoVis and Visual Analytics course and an overview of techniques and tools for interactive and animated visualization, including Javascript, D3.js, Vega-Lite, Vega-Altair, observable
- Practical Tools for Machine Learning: An introduction to Python programming language course and relevant libraries for data science (numpy, pandas, matplotlib)
Aug 2021

Python High School Mentor For KAUST Virtual Academy Program

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Conferences And Presentations

Jun 2023
Doppler Volume Rendering

The 25th edition of EuroVis, Leipzig, Germany
- I presented our paper Doppler Volume Rendering at EuroVis 2023 conference
Jun 2022
ArMath

The 13th Edition of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, France
- I presented our paper ArMATH at LREC 2022 conference

Education

2022 - Present
PhD, Computer Science

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
- Advisor: Professor Markus Hadwiger
- Focus: Visualization in Astrophysics, High Performance Computing, Scientific visualization, GPU programming
2020 - 2021
Master's Degree, Computer Science

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
- Thesis Advisor: Professor Xiangliang Zhang
- Thesis: Solving Arabic Math Word Problems via Deep Learning
- Focus: AI and Scientific Visualization
- I Took courses in Scientific Visualization, GPU programming, AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Reinforcement Learning, Bioinformatics, Numerical Linear Algebra, and Probability & Statistics in R
2016 - 2020

Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science

Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, Saudi Arabia

Technical And Soft Skills

Programming Languages

Python

C/C++

CUDA

JavaScript

HTML

CSS

MATLAB

Java

SQL

Bash

Tools

OpenGL

PyTorch

Numpy

Pandas

OpenCV

Flask

ReactJS

JQuery

Android

Linux

Technical Skills

GPU Programming

Computer Graphics

Visualization

Data Analysis

Artificial Intelligence

Deep Learning

Software Development

Servers

Soft Skills

Leadership And Team Work

Time Management And Planning

Initiative And Self-motivation

Problem-Solving And Creativity

Working Under Pressure

Communication And Interpersonal Skills

Volunteering

English, Arabic And Japanese

Graduate Student Researcher

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Visiting Researcher

Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden

Graduate Student Researcher

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Teaching Assistant - KAUST MEngg in AI

Ministry of Interior, Saudi Arabia

Graduate Courses Teaching Assistant

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Instructor - AI Specialization

KAUST Academy, Saudi Arabia

Teaching Assistant - KAUST MS in Data Science and Analytics

ARAMCO, Saudi Arabia

Python High School Mentor For KAUST Virtual Academy Program

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Doppler Volume Rendering

The 25th edition of EuroVis, Leipzig, Germany

ArMath

The 13th Edition of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, France

PhD, Computer Science

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Master's Degree, Computer Science

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science

Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, Saudi Arabia