Imagine you're at a meeting and you need to download a video on your phone. Instead of choosing between wireless and 3G, what if you could combine them to download the clip in half the time? Or, what if you've written an email, hit the send button, but don't want to pay for it to go out through 3G? Perhaps your smartphone could wait until you're connected to free Wi-Fi before mailing it out.

These are some of the technologies being developed by Khaled Harras, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. Harras' project, which is in collaboration with Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology in Egypt, won the Best Computing and Information Technology Research Program at Qatar Foundation's third Annual Research Forum. The prestigious award comes with a $100,000 prize for future research.

Titled, "OPERETTA: An Optimal Deployable Energy Efficient Bandwidth Aggregation System," Harras' research builds on previous attempts to improve multi-interface mobile devices, such as smartphones, by allowing users to concurrently connect to the Internet in different ways, such as 3G, 4G, WiFi and Bluetooth. Users now choose between interfaces based on factors such as speed, energy consumption and cost. But Harras' work would allow users to combine interfaces for optimal speed, or to choose 3G for a time-sensitive task while postponing another task until a cheaper option, such as Wi-Fi, opens up.

Even better, Harras said, no changes in existing infrastructure are necessary. In other words, OPERETTA tells YouTube how best to download a video, rather than YouTube having to make changes to accommodate his technology.

Harras wasn't the only Carnegie Mellon researcher recognized at the Annual Research Forum, which took place at the Qatar National Convention Centre in October. Dania Aded Rabbou, a 2012 graduate in computer science, received the Best Student Computing and Information Technology Research award and a $5,500 cash prize for a senior thesis project titled, "SCOUT: Extending the Reach of Social-Based Context-Aware Ubiquitous Systems. Her research was co-supervised by Harras and Abderrahmen Mtibaa, a postdoctoral research associate at Carnegie Mellon Qatar.

Building on previous research in the field, SCOUT leverages personal information from applications like Facebook and combines it with a person's location to offer real-time services in a variety of ways. For example, a shopper who plays tennis might learn of racquets on sale in a mall they just entered. Or, a student might locate their friends through an app showing who's having lunch where. The study adds to previous research by developing a way to share information with users who aren't even hooked up to the Internet, Harras said.

If such technology sounds invasive, don't worry. "It's a service that you'd sign up for—and if you no longer want that service, you just turn it off," Harras said. He believes it would be popular in Qatar, where mobile penetration runs at about 3.9 devices per household, according to ICTQatar.

More than 180 national, regional and international institutions submitted 658 abstracts to the 2012 Annual Research Forum symposium, during which four researchers and eight students were formally recognized for their excellence in research that supports the nation's development. The winning projects were reviewed and selected by a committee of international scholars, academics and researchers.

"We are very pleased to see Carnegie Mellon Qatar win two out of the three computing research prizes in Qatar in the presence of all research constituents in Qatar and many prominent research scientists who were invited as part of the Arab Expatriate Scientist network. This is certainly a testament to the quality of the work being done at the university," said Ilker Baybars, dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.