Muhammad Azeem Abbas

Electronic document management: A paperless university model

Currently Computer based systems are used by most of the universities around the world however, these systems are still paper based which involve physical paper existence. At present most of the universities are suffering obstacles in document management due to using paper based or semi automated systems. The objective of this paper is to present a paperless model for the university management system. A survey is conducted that enlisted some fundamental characteristics required to implement successful paperless environment. It was noted that simply converting paper-based activities to digital ones will not achieve a system without paper. Instead it is required to address complete model and its influencing factors at once. At the last we present a case study that reveals that tools and technologies are available for implementing paperless system but only there interweaving is required in a systematic manner.

A New Trigonometric Spline Approach to Numerical Solution of Generalized Nonlinear Klien-Gordon Equation

The generalized nonlinear Klien-Gordon equation plays an important role in quantum mechanics. In this paper, a new three-time level implicit approach based on cubic trigonometric B-spline is presented for the approximate solution of this equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions. The usual finite difference approach is used to discretize the time derivative while cubic trigonometric B-spline is applied as an interpolating function in the space dimension. Several examples are discussed to exhibit the feasibility and capability of the approach. The absolute errors and error norms are also computed at different times to assess the performance of the proposed approach and the results were found to be in good agreement with known solutions and with existing schemes in literature.

Semantic Web Technologies for Pre-School Cognitive Skills Tutoring System *

Current teaching strategies mainly follow instructional or constructive pedagogical models. In instructional model learning, contents are authored for teaching and evaluation of a concept. Whilst in constructive model, a student is exposed to the learning environment that allows him to learn new concepts, and his actions provide an evaluation of his understanding of the concept. Manual authoring of such learning contents not only requires specialized skills, thinking and dedication, but they also take large amount of time. Similarly within instructional environment, authoring any new content that supports the current teaching activity is very difficult. This paper presents an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that facilitates the authoring of learning contents for both instructional and constructive teaching strategies. Proposed ITS uses semantic web formalism, namely ontology, for knowledge representation. This work shows that ontologies correctly and consistently models the domain knowledge that supports pedagogical activities, software development activities, ITS user friendly interface and provides robust reasoning facility for creation of dynamic contents. The proposed ITS provides authoring facility explicitly for teaching cognitive skills such as classification, relatedness, comparison (sequencing, discrimination, size etc.) and reasoning. With the use of ontologies, cognitive skills are translated into concepts/classes and properties/roles with restrictions. Reasoning and inference provided by ontologies are used for dynamic authoring of learning contents. Finally evaluation of proposed ITS is conducted for its correctness and consistency of domain knowledge, usability and efficiency & effectiveness of contents authoring.

Graph based query trimming of conjunctive queries in semantic caching

In semantic cache query processing, an important step is query trimming. Trimming a query can potentially reduce the answer size that is required to retrieve from a remote server. Existing query trimming technique is based on Boolean logic, which inhibits several shortcomings such as after trimming it expands number of predicate terms and induces disjunction even if conjunctive queries are under consideration. It trims the query segment wise and can not process the combined semantics of all the segments in a cache. In this paper we propose a query trimming technique that is based on variation of modeling approach (graph based) used for satisfiability and implication testing. We demonstrated with a case study that our proposed technique overcomes limitations of the previous query trimming technique and hence improves semantic cache query processing.

Cross attribute knowledge: A missing concept in semantic cache query processing

Any semantic cache query processing technique is said to be efficient, if it is able to find maximum possible or complete answer from the cache within tractable time. This work evaluates previous semantic cache query processing techniques on the basis of maximum data retrieval (MDR). For this several cases are provided where previous query processing techniques are unable to find maximum possible or complete answer even when it is present in the cache. It is due to neglecting implicit knowledge (Cross Attribute Knowledge) present in semantics of the cache. This knowledge is identified and formally presented here in this work.

OWL2 benchmarking for the evaluation of knowledge based systems

OWL2 semantics are becoming increasingly popular for the real domain applications like Gene engineering and health MIS. The present work identifies the research gap that negligible attention has been paid to the performance evaluation of Knowledge Base Systems (KBS) using OWL2 semantics. To fulfil this identified research gap, an OWL2 benchmark for the evaluation of KBS is proposed. The proposed benchmark addresses the foundational blocks of an ontology benchmark i.e. data schema, workload and performance metrics. The proposed benchmark is tested on memory based, file based, relational database and graph based KBS for performance and scalability measures. The results show that the proposed benchmark is able to evaluate the behaviour of different state of the art KBS on OWL2 semantics. On the basis of the results, the end users (i.e. domain expert) would be able to select a suitable KBS appropriate for his domain.

Predicting performance of electrical engineering students using cognitive and non-cognitive features for identification of potential dropouts:

The student dropout rate in universities is fascinating, especially among the students of Electrical Engineering. Even the most developed European countries face 40% to 50% dropout rate of engineering students during their first year, and the rate can be as high as 80% for some engineering disciplines. This problem calls attention of educators and university administration to take measures which can help in the reduction of the dropout rate and assist students in successfully completing their degree. Among many other solutions to control the student dropout rate, one is the adoption of a prediction mechanism whereby students can be warned about their potentially poor performance so that they can improve their performance resulting in better grades. Most of the existing prediction mechanisms apply various machine learning techniques on student cognitive features. In addition, non-cognitive features also have significant impact on students’ performance; however, they have been sparsely applied for prediction. This research aims at improving the existing prediction mechanism by exploiting both cognitive and non-cognitive features of students for predicting their results. It has been found in the result analysis that addition of cognitive features increases prediction accuracies of decision tree; however, the addition does not play a significant role in other techniques. The study also identified the individual cognitive features that should be considered by students and universities to cater for drop outs.

Heuristics Evaluation of Preschool Cognitive Skills Learning System

The ubiquitous use of computer by children is highly perceptible in current research. Therefore, providing the increasing interaction to computer technologies demands a careful designing of these technologies keeping in view the pedagogical aspects, psychology, abilities and interests of the children. These requirements make development of such applications a very complex job. Therefore, existing applications follow the content delivery model i.e. previously crafted contents are stored to deliver to a user. This limits the effective learning of the children. The present work proposed a rule-based system utilizing semantic web technologies (Ontologies) as a domain knowledge and semantic web rule language (SWRL) for rules representation. The proposed system overcomes the complexity of developing the intelligent and interactive applications for children. Evaluation is performed by using formal usability evaluation heuristics over an application developed using our proposed system for preschool cognitive skills tutoring. Results provided here demonstrates that the underlying knowledge modeled through the use of Ontologies is highly supported to flexible and child-friendly interfaces and pedagogical and playability activities (motor, reasoning) for cognitive skills tutoring.

Effectiveness of ontology-based learning content generation for preschool cognitive skills learning

ABSTRACT During early childhood, children start developing their cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioural skills, laying the foundation for life-long learning. Cognitive skills are usually taught in traditional classrooms through the use of textbooks and worksheets. The learning content in these textbooks and worksheets is static pre-authored content that is repeatedly used for teaching and learning. This repetition jeopardises the childs learning of individualised and cognitive skills. Preschool cognitive skills learning content comprises facts of everyday life. Similarly, the Semantic Web attempts to model these facts through ontologies. From this, a relationship appears between preschool cognitive skills learning content and the ontologies. The present work focuses on the stated problem and presents the theoretical and development details of a child-friendly tutoring application that dynamically generates cognitive skills learning content using ontologies as domain knowledge. The proposed application was evaluated in a preschool environment for its learning effectiveness and the correctness of the generated content. Three groups of preschool children participated in the study for preschool cognitive skills learning through the use of the proposed application. The first group learned the cognitive skills through the traditional method with textbooks and the teachers teaching. The second group learned the skills through the proposed application at school in classroom sessions. The third group experienced the proposed application both at school and at home, along with regular classroom sessions. The results show significant gains by the third group over the other two groups, and hence support the use of the proposed application in practice. However, the enhanced learning by the third group disappears if the additional application usage time is removed. Moreover, the results of the expert evaluation show that a great deal of the learning content was correctly generated, thus justifying the true modelling of the domain ontology.

The effectiveness of semantic web based preschool cognitive skills tutoring system: An empirical study

Two groups had participated in a study on the effectiveness of Semantic Web based mobile application for preschool cognitive skills learning. The first group had the traditional method with textbooks and teachers teaching. The second group worked with the proposed application at school along with the classroom sessions. A quasi experimental pre and post tests model was conducted to measure the learning gain for classification and relatedness cognitive skills. The results had shown significant gain by the second group over the first one and hence support the use of the proposed application in practice. The conclusion is that proposed application can be used as teaching support along with formal school learning.