His Majesty King Abdullah on Monday presented certificates to graduates of Yarmouk University and Prince Faisal Centre for Computer Engineering.

The graduates, who work for the Jordanian, UAE and Bahraini armed forces, were enrolled in the engineering programme for the last 14 months to learn how to develop military, medical and industrial systems and equipment locally.

The students, who received masters degrees in embedded systems, worked on more than 30 projects that can be further developed to become sophisticated military and medical products, according to graduate Major Khaled Sarayreh.

Retired Major General Fadel Mohamamad, director of the Prince Faisal Centre, said the students spent long hours in laboratories throughout the programme, developing solutions to technical difficulties faced by the military by creating cheap and efficient local programmes that could replace the imported programmes used by the armed forces.

An embedded system, the subject of study, is a specialized computer system that is part of a larger system or machine. Typically, it is housed on a single microprocessor board with the programmes stored in a memory chip.

All appliances that have a digital interface — watches, microwaves, VCRs, cars — utilize embedded systems. Some embedded systems include an operating system, but many are specialized to an extent that the entire logic can be implemented as a single programme.

Yarmouk University President Mohammad Sabbarini said the first batch of the programme's graduates is ready to play a role in improving military systems. He said the success of the programme is an indication of the success of King Abdullah's vision of making the Kingdom an ICT hub in the Middle East. The government has been exerting efforts to achieve this goal by linking education with technology to develop human resources, and by providing the adequate infrastructure to attract the world's major ICT companies to invest in Jordan.