Amal Dandashi

Enhancing the cognitive and learning skills of children with intellectual disability through physical activity and edutainment games

This work introduces an edutainment system specifically designed to help children with intellectual disability (ID) in order to allow them to have an enhanced and enjoyable learning process and addresses the need for integrating physical activity into their daily lives. The proposed system consists of a multimedia technology based games with a tangible user interface. The edutainment system was tested on 77 children with different intellectual disabilities (IDs). The mildly disabled groups achieved best results in terms of scores and coordination, but all the observed groups exhibited high motivation levels. The results proved that the system had very positive effects on the children, in terms of cognition and motivational levels, especially as the children became more physically active in the classrooms. Instructors also expressed willingness to incorporate the edutainment system into the classroom on a daily basis, as a complementary tool to conventional learning.

A combined Cognitive Multimedia Model for children with intellectual disabilities

Children with Down syndrome and other developmental disabilities are often faced with intellectual disorders ranging from mild to severe. This study proposes a multimedia-based learning model which combines Mayers Cognitive Multimedia Learning Model with Skinners Operant Conditioning, and involves implementing phonological awareness in the learning process. This is implemented with the use of animated multimedia tutorials and exercises allow children with Down syndrome and other disabilities an improved learning opportunity. This system is tested on a group of 100 disabled children and results have indicated increased levels of motivation and high relative performance scores.

Semantic-Web automated course management and evaluation system using mobile applications

Different types of e-assessment systems that are recognized at universities and based on the campus wireless have been developed. These systems help the students to use their Mobile Phones as learning media to access the information more easily from anywhere and at anytime. Seppala and Alamaki developed a mobile learning project for teacher training. Their study compared the effectiveness of internet, face-to-face and mobile based instructions. Al Masri has proposed a study to compare the effective strategy in paper-based assessment with mobile-based assessment for assessing university students in English literature. It has been found that students gained better scores in mobile phone-based test than in paper-based test. This paper aims to determine and measure the effects of mobile-based assessments on the perception, achievement levels and performance of the students in internet-assisted courses. The main functionalities and features of this paper are: Knowledge evaluation, automatic generation of exams, exam grading, communication, course management, and questions-bank database.

Audio-Visual Video Classification System Design: For Arabic News Domain

There are many research initiatives tackling automated multimodal video classification, however very few of them are targeted towards classifying Arabic news-related videos. In light of the vast proliferation of raw digital Arabic data, specifically videos, over the internet, uncategorized and unused, we propose a new system to tackle this problem. The proposed system design consists of visual features extraction and classification, combined with audio-based event classification, as well semantic-content processing. Results are to be combined and documented using multimedia classification fusion techniques. We also propose to develop a new Arabic dataset based on news channel videos as well as raw videos from various online sources for testing and evaluation.

Cognitive technology for children with hearing impairments

Lack of specialists, speech instructors and sign language instructors in the Arab world have led to the impediment of the education and cognitive development for children with Hearing Impairments (HI). The objective of this research is to investigate the needs of people with HI in the Arab world, and propose a system design that would help alleviate the challenges they face. The proposed system framework is centered on Arabic-based Natural Language Processing, with the objectives focused on presenting a multiple component educational system that utilizes multimedia-based learning, to enhance the cognitive and communication skills of children with HI.

Arabic Named Entity Recognition—A Survey and Analysis

As Arabic digital data has been increasing in abundance; the need for processing this information is growing. Named entity recognition (NER) is an information extraction technique that is vital to the processes of natural language processing (NLP). The ambiguous characteristics of the Arabic language make tasks related to NER and NLP very challenging. In addition to that, work related to Arabic NER is rather limited and under-studied. In this study, we survey previous works and methodologies and provide an analysis and discussion on the feature sets used, evaluation tools and advantages and disadvantages of each technique.

Framework for development of cognitive technology for children with hearing impairments

The main aim of this study is to investigate the needs of people with HI in the Arab world, and propose a system design that would help alleviate the challenges they face. The system design is centered on Arabic-based Natural Language Processing, with the objectives focused on presenting a multiple component educational system that utilizes multimedia-based learning, to enhance the cognitive and communication skills of children with HI.

An ontology-based system to dynamically extract multimedia elements for children's tutorials

Children with intellectual disabilities are very challenging to teach, and can learn best with the use of different methodologies that engage their senses, such as using images, sounds and clips. In this work, a new educational system that can generate multimedia based tutorials dynamically is proposed. This system comprises of several components; (1) using a Stemming algorithm for text processing, (2) Formal Concept Analysis for dynamic extraction of keywords, (3) Ontology based concept extraction, (4)Google API is used to query the Google Image Database and extract the required multimedia elements, which are then mapped accordingly. A database of keywords, associated synonyms and multimedia elements is built, hence every student can have his/her own database. Instructors can then update and change the contents of their tutorials speedily and efficiently.