Mohammed Basheri

A multi-touch interface for enhancing collaborative UML diagramming

Multi-touch interfaces facilitate collaborative learning and, thus, represent a promising educational technology. Their ability to synchronously accommodate multiple users is an advantage in co-located collaborative design tasks. This paper explores the multi-touch interfaces potential in collaborative Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagramming by comparing it to a PC-based tool. The results of the study demonstrate that the use of the multi-touch table enables an increase in the equity of participation, enhanced collaboration amongst team members, and the facilitation of parallel-participative design.

Collaborative software design using multi-touch tables

The use of multi-touch interfaces for collaborative software design has received significant attention. Multi-touch surfaces can accommodate more than one user synchronously which is particularly useful for collaborative design tasks with open-ended nature. In this paper, we explore the potential of using multi-touch technology for Unified Modeling Language (UML) software design by comparing it with PC-based collaborative software design. Results show that the use of multi-touch table enhanced collaboration amongst the team members and increased shared contribution.

Ontological Reasoning About Situations from Calendar Events

Inferring situations is the key to developing situation-aware applications that exploit users’ situations to support the fulfillment of their tasks on the move. In this paper, we take an attempt to reason about users’ various situations from their calendar events, provided the calendar event data represent accurate scheduling of ‘real-world’ events. We show how ontology can be used to infer situations from calendar events by considering both the semantic and temporal aspects of situations. We develop a situation ontology and propose a semantic rule based approach to deducing and abstracting situations from data collected from calendar system. The feasibility and applicability of our approach is demonstrated by developing a prototype mobile phone call interrupt management application that uses user’s situation information for handling incoming phone calls. We further present an empirical evaluation of our approach on a real dataset. Our preliminary results show that our approach has a great potential to infer users’ various situations.

CrowdyQ: a virtual crowdsourcing platform for question items development in higher education

Developing large-scale exams for a massive number of preparatory year students by a small designated committee of exam developers is a common practice in colleges and universities around the world. However, in adopting this approach, some higher institutions might be confronted with some obstacles such as the unavailability of skilful exam developers and proper resources. To address this issue, we proposed CrowdyQ, a virtual crowdsourcing platform, to investigate the impact of involving a large number of same-subject university instructors in the creation and evaluation of question items in a collaborative manner for the purpose of developing high quality exams. This paper describes the development of CrowdyQ platform and it discusses briefly its potential significance in developing high quality large-scale exam questions in a university context.