Asfahaan Mirza

Design and Implementation of Socially Driven Knowledge Management Systems for Revitalizing Endangered Languages

One language and its culture die every 2 weeks. If nothing is done, half of the over 7,000 languages spoken today could disappear by the end of this century. Only 600 or so languages with large numbers of speakers (more than 100,000) may survive. The current state of language endangerment highlights the need for revitalizing endangered languages for the survival of culture, diversity, and knowledge.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Preserve and Learn Endangered Languages

The languages are disappearing at a frightening rate; half of 7105 plus languages spoken today may disappear by end of this century. When a language becomes extinct, communities lose their cultural identity, practices tied to a language and intellectual wealth. The rapid loss of languages motivates this study.

Sustainable, Holistic, Adaptable, Real-Time, and Precise (SHARP) Approach Towards Developing Health and Wellness Systems

As populations age and chronic diseases become more prevalent, new strategies are required to help people live well. Traditional models of episodic health care will not be sufficient to meet changing health care needs and the reorientation of services towards maintaining function as opposed to treating illness. One strategy to meet these challenges is an increased focus on self-care via use of broader social networks and seamless integration of applications with lifestyle activities, particularly for people with chronic diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory conditions. There has also been a rapid increase in a range of technologies for connecting different components of the health system and delivering services through smartphones and connected devices. Our proposal is to pursue systems development in healthcare in a way that considers a range of aspects known as SHARP: Sustainable, Holistic, Adaptive, Real-time and Precise. This approach will provide solutions that will be useful and effective for managing the long-term well-being of individuals.

Architecting Crowd-Sourced Language Revitalisation Systems: Generalisation and Evaluation to Te Reo Māori and Vietnamese

Many linguists claim as many as half of the world’s nearly 7,105 languages spoken today could disappear by the end of this century. When a language becomes extinct, communities lose their cultural identity and practices tied to a language, and intellectual wealth. Preservation of endangered languages is a critical but challenging effort. A language is not preserved and revitalized by just documenting, archiving and developing shared resources. The revitalisation is highly dependent on the learning and usage of the language. Most current systems and approaches do one or the other. There are few systems or approaches that interweave preservation with learning. The purpose of our research is to architect a language revitalisation system that (a) leverages and integrates crowd-sourced collective intelligence approaches with knowledge management approaches to (b) capture, curate, discover, and learn endangered languages. We propose and implement an generalisable architecture that can support any language revitalisation effort in terms of capture, curate, discover, and learn. The validity of the research was tested by implementing the system to support Te Reo Maori and Vietnamese. Furthermore, we evaluate the concepts, processes, architecture, and implementation using a number of mechanisms.

Ubiquitous Individual Information Systems

There is more computing power in your smart phone now than all the computers used by NASA in 1969 to place man on the moon.

Efficient Transportation - Does the Future Lie in Vehicle Technologies or in Transportation Systems?

Transportation is one of the most fundamental aspects of modern society; a key enabler of the many other ways modern man has developed. This paper assesses the issue of transportation from both a high-level and more detailed perspective to provide a holistic picture of the current landscape for potential transportation efficiency improvement – along both congestion-related and environmental sustainability dimensions.

Transportation at the Confluence of Engineering and Big Data: Design of Automated Motorway Lane-Changing Systems

Transportation is an aspect of life that touches every one of us. With rapid advances in technology and lifestyles, modern civilization is witnessing an ever-increasing need for improvements in transportation efficiency and effectiveness to keep pace with modern demands and steadily increasing populations.

Acceptance of Technology-Driven Interventions for Improving Medication Adherence

Medication Adherence (MA) plays an important role in managing patients with long term illness, enhance patient’s health and wellness, and it reduces the economic cost and saves lives. The purpose of this research is to address the collaboration of technology with healthcare, in solving the challenge of medication adherence. A questionnaire of 25 questions was sent out through email to 200 people, to get their feedback about medication adherence, the reasons of non-adherent and their level of acceptance in using the mobile application technology as an interventional tool for medication adherence. Results showed a statistically significant correlation between age and medication adherence (P = 0.012). There is a statistical significant impact of forgetfulness on non-medication adherence (P-value = 0.0003). Additionally, majority of the participants identified their willingness to use the application to help in medication adherence (P = 0.001). The conclusion drawn from this study suggests that people are willing to increase awareness of medication adherence.

Persuasive Educational Platform Design for Underprivileged Children

Education is a powerful key for children to unlock the world and achieve a higher quality of life. However, in today’s world, there are millions of underprivileged children who do not have access to education. Research has long shown the benefits of technology-facilitated education – including higher achievement and improved attitudes towards learning. Despite these trends, technology-facilitated education remains restricted to the conventional education-system model and classroom setting; more of a tack-on than a truly disruptive force. We see great potential for quality, curriculum-approved education to soon be delivered via a software platform to even the most marginalized communities. Connecting key groups such as teachers, parents, and preschoolers, and bringing disruption in a similar way to how social media has revolutionized our cultural norms around interpersonal interaction. In this paper, we introduce the current trends and weaknesses of foundational areas in the literature: underprivileged preschool education, technology, and persuasive system design. Secondly, we outline the key gaps in the literature and explore the future research direction to create a persuasive educational platform for underprivileged children. Finally, we present and analyze a new integrated platform focused on enabling underprivileged children to have access to proper education. The platform we present is an integrated, persuasive, vocabulary learning system which connects configurers, parents, teachers, and preschoolers together. The functionalities of the system can be customized according to the current issues facing underprivileged children, although our system would suit normal children’s learning requirements at the same time.

Collective Intelligence based Endangered Language Revitalisation Systems: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

The languages are disappearing at an alarming rate; half of 7105 plus languages spoken today may disappear by end of this century. When a language becomes extinct, communities lose their cultural identity, practices tied to a language and intellectual wealth. The rapid loss of languages motivates this study. We first introduce collective intelligence, endangered languages, and language revitalisation. Secondly we discuss and explore how to leverage collective intelligence to preserve, curate, discover, learn, share and eventually revitalise endangered languages. Thirdly we compare and synthesise existing language preservation and learning systems. Subsequently, we outline the research methodology. Finally, we propose the design, implementation and evaluation of “Save Lingo” and “Learn Lingo” apps for revitalising endangered languages. The systems are instantiated and validated in context of te reo Māori, Vietnamese and non-roman script languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Hindi.