AbdulMalik S. Al-Salman

Ultra Wideband Indoor Positioning Technologies: Analysis and Recent Advances

In recent years, indoor positioning has emerged as a critical function in many end-user applications; including military, civilian, disaster relief and peacekeeping missions. In comparison with outdoor environments, sensing location information in indoor environments requires a higher precision and is a more challenging task in part because various objects reflect and disperse signals. Ultra WideBand (UWB) is an emerging technology in the field of indoor positioning that has shown better performance compared to others. In order to set the stage for this work, we provide a survey of the state-of-the-art technologies in indoor positioning, followed by a detailed comparative analysis of UWB positioning technologies. We also provide an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) to analyze the present state of UWB positioning technologies. While SWOT is not a quantitative approach, it helps in assessing the real status and in revealing the potential of UWB positioning to effectively address the indoor positioning problem. Unlike previous studies, this paper presents new taxonomies, reviews some major recent advances, and argues for further exploration by the research community of this challenging problem space.

Comparative Survey of Indoor Positioning Technologies, Techniques, and Algorithms

The user location information represents a core dimension as understanding user context is a prerequisite for providing human-centered services that generally improve quality of life. In comparison with outdoor environments, sensing location information in indoor environments requires a higher precision and is a more challenging task due in part to the expected various objects (such as walls and people) that reflect and disperse signals. In this paper, we survey the related work in the field of indoor positioning by providing a comparative analysis of the state-of-the-art technologies, techniques, and algorithms. Unlike previous studies and surveys, our survey present new taxonomies, review some major recent advances, and argue on the area open problems and future potential. We believe this paper would spur further exploration by the research community of this challenging problem space.

A proposed sentiment analysis tool for modern Arabic using human-based computing

Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying the polarity of sentiments held in opinions found in pieces of text and classifying them as positive, negative or neutral. In this paper, we propose the implementation of a sentiment analysis tool that is conducted over text found in Arabic new media including web forums, comments on newspaper articles and other websites with evaluative content. The expected input of the tool, which is informal Colloquial Arabic, is characterized to be of highly non-structured nature and subject to trends used to express sentiments. Our solution is a novel technique that merges the area of human computation with the task of natural language processing.

Subjectivity and sentiment analysis of Arabic: Trends and challenges

Recently, subjectivity and sentiment analysis of Arabic has received much attention from the research community. In the past two years, an enormous number of references in the field have emerged compared to what has been published in previous years. In this paper, we present an updated survey of the emerging research on subjectivity and sentiment analysis of Arabic. We also highlight the challenges and future research directions in this field.

Measuring the credibility of Arabic text content in Twitter

Recent research in measuring web content credibility automatically for text and multimedia have addressed many languages. Unfortunately, there is no research for credibility measurements of Arabic web content. Thus, this paper proposes a solution to automatically measure the credibility of Arabic web content. The automatic tool we present in this paper measures Arabic content credibility published in Twitter (a micro blogging service) targeting the news domain. Our tool is based on two approaches. The first approach uses the similarity between Twitter posts and authentic news sources, while the second approach is based on a set of proposed features, among them is the similarity with verified content. Preliminary evaluations of our tool have shown that the first approach for rating tweets credibility has higher precision and recall compared with the second approach.

Towards a computerized Arabic Braille environment

People with visual disabilities face many difficulties and barriers when using computers and the Internet. Such people need the help of IT developers to create adaptive technologies that facilitate their interaction with the computers and Internet.

Exploiting Arabic Wikipedia for automatic ontology generation: A proposed approach

Ontological models play an important role in the Semantic Web. Despite being widely spread, there are a few known attempts to build ontologies for the Arabic language. As a result, a lack of Arabic Semantic Web applications is encountered. In this paper, we propose an approach to build ontologies automatically for the Arabic language from Wikipedia. Our approach relies on the semantic field theory such that any Wikipedian article is analyzed to extract semantic relations using its infobox and the list of categories. We will also present our system architecture along with an initial evaluation to evaluate the effectiveness and correctness of the resultant ontological model.

A novel approach for Braille images segmentation

Braille recognition is the ability to detect and recognize Braille characters embossed on Braille document. The result is used in several applications such as embossing, printing, translating...etc. However, the performance of these applications is affected by poor quality imaging due to several factors such as scanner quality, scan resolution, lighting, and type of embossed documents. In this work, we extend previous research efforts on Braille recognition systems by proposing a new method for Braille image segmentation using Between-Class Variance with Gamma distribution. The technique of Between-Class Variance was proposed by Otsu using a mixture of Gaussian distributions. Gaussian distribution is widely used for modeling the histogram of images, but due to the asymmetric nature of the distribution of gray levels in Braille images, Gamma distribution is more suitable. The proposed method is composed of two main parts. (a) Find the optimal estimated threshold values using Between-Class Variance with a mixture of Gamma distributions. (b) Use the optimal estimated thresholds values to segment Braille images. Our method was applied on several Braille images scanned by flatbed scanner. The experimental results on Braille images using this technique showed improvement in the accuracy of Braille images segmentation.

Towards the development of an automatic readability measurements for arabic language

Currently, there are more than 200 readability formulas developed since the 1920s. Only a handful of these formulas are reliable to determine the reading-level of a sample text. Ascertaining the readability of curricula is an important step toward optimizing the effectiveness of the educational progress. Readability measurements are done using manual computation. This is a tedious and time-consuming task. However, nowadays, automatic readability computation has gained much popularity than ever before. This can be attributed to the advancement in the field of natural language processing. Languages such as English and Spanish have benefited from the formation of automatic readability systems. Absence of automated readability measurement of Arabic texts and the large amount of information which are written in Arabic encouraged us to work on finding an automatic readability system for our language; the mother language for millions of Arabs. In this paper we will review the different readability research and then propose a system for automating the readability measurement of Arabic text. Within the paper we also report the results of our pilot experiment carried out on the different well-known Arabic, Swedish and English readability formulas.

An Efficient Braille Cells Recognition

This paper presents a new algorithm for Braille cells recognition using image processing technique. Scanned Braille document is composed from three classes of gray-level: (i) background, (ii) recto dots, and (iii) verso dots. We segment the Braille image using a stability thresholding method with a mixture of Beta distributions. To ensure correct detection and extraction of dots composing Braille cells, a grid is formed to contain the Braille dots. We identified a recto dot by a light region that exists above a dark region using the segmented image. In the same way, we identify a verso dot in double sided document by a light region that exists below a dark region. After having recto and verso dots, Braille cells are then recognized based on the standard regrouping of dots. Experimentation showed that Braille cells composing are automatically identified from those grids with excellent accuracy.