Mohammed AlSharekh

Al-Sharekh was born in Kuwait in 1942. He earned his bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Cairo University in 1965, and his master's degree in development economics in 1968 from Williams College in Massachusetts, United States.

Al-Sharekh died on 6 March 2024, at the age of 81.

Al-Sharekh served as the Deputy Director-General for the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development from 1969 to 1973, as a representative of Kuwait and Arab Group of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (I.B.R.D), Washington D.C. from 1973 to 1975 and co-founded and chaired the Board of Directors of the Industrial Bank of Kuwait, he also served as Vice Chairman of the Association of Arab Economists.

In 1980, he founded AlAlamiah Group with headquarters in Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and established Sakhr Software Company as a project to introduce the Arabic language into computers in 1982. Upon that, they worked on the research and development of Arabic NLP (Natural Language Processing) which led to the development of the Arabic OCR, Arabic machine translation, and Arabic automatic speech recognition.

In 1997, Al-Sharekh founded Book in a Newspaper project in collaboration with UNESCO. In 1987, he was one of the financiers of the Center for Arab Unity Studies and the Arab Organization for Translation, and the Institut du Monde Arabe in 1987. Al-Sharekh developed the first Quran computer software, in addition to the nine Hadith books software in English, the Islamic Information Archive, OCR in 1994, Arabic Text to Speech in 1998, Machine translation from and into Arabic in 2002, automatic speech translation in 2010 and developing more than 90 educational and coding programs for the Arab youth.