JEDDAH — Saudi scholarship student, Osama Albishri, received the Julie Dodd Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award for a lecturer in the College of Journalism and Communication at the University of Florida, while studying for his Ph.D. in international communication in the same college. "The program assigns the student to teach bachelor's level courses, for which he receives a scholarship, which means the university pays tuition fees, medical insurance costs, and a monthly salary," he said in an interview with Al Arabiya.net. He added that he did not have to do so because he is a Saudi government scholarship recipient. Albishri revealed that his supervisors approached him several times to join in this experiment, but he declined out of fear of failure due to language and cultural obstacles, along with high evaluation standards. "After the first two years, I decided to become an assistant teacher," he continued, "and at the start of the third year, I worked as a lecturer, studying the "Public Relations Research" course. "This course covers qualitative and quantitative research skills, data collection methods, writing and presentation of the final report using the simulation method." As a result of evaluating students and administering the department, the Saudi student got the award and was honored at the college's closing ceremony, as well as being nominated for the Best Lecturer Award at the University of Florida. Osama said that his doctoral thesis is about "studying Iranian-American relations since the 1979 revolution until 2020" and focuses on how the Iranian issue was handled in the US elections, including the impact of political discourse on Iran and how it influenced US Congress legislation during the election of the new president. Albishri analyzed almost 1,000 materials collected from the archives of election campaigns and news pieces published in the newspapers The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, using quantitative analysis and computational methodologies. He went on to say, "The study's goal is to better understand the tactics employed by presidential candidates in presenting the Iranian dossier and the evolution of topics related to the data over a forty-year period. "The research is still ongoing, and preliminary findings will be presented at the International Communication Conference in Paris in May next year." Albishri also conducted a study, under the supervision of a Russian researcher, regarding the visual dimension of framing former US President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential elections. More than 800 photos of the US president were collected from 16 magazines in Ukraine, Serbia, Poland, China and Greece. "I use artificial intelligence to interpret and classify facial expressions, as well as human analysis to classify behaviors such as eye contact, interaction, body posture, arm posture, and hand posture." Albishri noted. The study's findings were presented at the International Conference on Journalism and Communication Education in Washington, DC, and are currently being reviewed for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
