S. M. Ferdous

Increasing Intelligibility in the Speech of the Autistic Children by an Interactive Computer Game

Autism is a disorder of neural development which affects about one in every 150 kids on average. One of the major complexities regarding autistic children in social communication is the speech disorder. The problems related to speech disorder fall into different categories and unintelligibility in speech is one of them. Although there is no definite medicine or treatment for autism, doctors, therapists, and special teachers can help kids with autism overcome many difficulties by different physical and psychological therapies. In this paper we have demonstrated our newly developed interactive computer game which will be helpful in increasing intelligibility in the speeches of autistic children and can be used as a therapy besides the traditional approaches. During our five months of intervention with the autistic children of Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF) at Dhaka, we checked the effectiveness of this therapy and got some encouraging results.

A Computer Game Based Approach for Increasing Fluency in the Speech of the Autistic Children

Autism is a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life. This is the result of a neurological disorder that affects the functioning of human brain. Children diagnosed with autism often are self-absorbed and seem to exist in a private world where they are unable to successfully communicate and interact with others. Sometimes they have difficulties in developing speaking skills and understanding what others say to them. Lack of fluency in the speech is one of the most frequently found problems with autistic children. The traditional methods for increasing fluency were found to be monotonous and hence, not much successful during our three months of observations over the participants of Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF) at Dhaka. Therefore, we developed an interactive computer game for the autistic children for improving the fluency in their speech. Our game produced encouraging results over a participant during three months of observation. In this paper, we describe our project and the outcomes.

Solving the Minimum Common String Partition Problem with the Help of Ants

In this paper, we consider the problem of finding a minimum common partition of two strings. The problem has its application in Genome Comparison. As it is an NP-hard, discrete combinatorial optimization problem, we employ a metaheuristic technique, namely, MAX–MIN ant system to solve this problem. To achieve better efficiency we first map the problem instance into a special kind of graph. Subsequently, we employ a MAX–MIN ant system to achieve high quality solutions for the problem. Experimental results show the superiority of our algorithm in comparison with the state of art algorithms in the literature. The improvement achieved is also justified by a standard statistical test.

Teaching intelligible speech to the autistic children by interactive computer games

Autism is considered to be a disorder of neural development which affects about 1 in every 150 kids. Specifically, some children with ASD are not fortunate enough to acquire the ability to communicate in their own language. Since speech is an important media of communication, socialization, and interaction with the world, these children need assistance while delivering speech to communicate to the world. Without proper speaking skills, these autistic children face difficulties in expressing their needs and emotions, too. Doctors, therapists, and special teachers usually help kids with autism to overcome many difficulties. However, the traditional methods of teaching clear speech to the autistic children suffer from being monotonous, laborious and not successful in many cases. Hence, we developed an interactive computer game which will be helpful to increase intelligibility in autistic children. During our five months of intervention with the autistic children of Autism Welfare Foundation (AWF) at Dhaka, we checked the effectiveness of this therapy and got some encouraging results.

An Integer Programming Formulation of the Minimum Common String Partition Problem.

We consider the problem of finding a minimum common string partition (MCSP) of two strings, which is an NP-hard problem. The MCSP problem is closely related to genome comparison and rearrangement, an important field in Computational Biology. In this paper, we map the MCSP problem into a graph applying a prior technique and using this graph, we develop an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for the problem. We implement the ILP formulation and compare the results with the state-of-the-art algorithms from the literature. The experimental results are found to be promising.

An Ant Colony Optimization approach to solve the minimum string cover problem

In this paper, we consider the problem of covering a set of strings S with a set of strings C. C is said to cover S if every string in S can be written as a concatenation of a set of strings which are elements of C. We discuss here three different variants of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and propose how we can solve the minimum string cover problem using these techniques. Our simulation results show that ACO based approach gives better solution than the existing approximation algorithm for this problem.

Finding network connectivity failure in a Wireless Sensor Network

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is prone to network connectivity failure. Since the nodes suffer from the power constraint and they are mostly deployed remotely, the network suffers from any time connectivity failure problem. Therefore, it is important to find the geographic location of the network discontinuity. The disconnected region is usually known as network cut. It is very important to know the location of this network cut to repair the network for smooth networking operation. In our paper, we propose an algorithm to detect the network cut in a WSN. We validate our method by experimental studies. We find that our method can locate the network discontinuity and the shape of disconnected region.

A metaheuristic approach for application partitioning in mobile system

Mobile devices such as smartphones are extremely popular now. In spite of their huge popularity, the computational ability of mobile devices is still low. Computational offloading is a way to transfer some of the heavy computational tasks to server(cloud) so that the efficiency and usability of the system increases. In this paper, we have developed a metaheuristic approach for application partitioning to maximize throughput and performance. Preliminary experiment suggest that our approach is better than the traditional all cloud and all mobile approach.

A Simulated Annealing approach for solving Minimum Manhattan Network Problem

In this paper we address the Minimum Manhattan Network (MMN) problem. It is an important geometric problem with vast applications. As it is an NP-complete discrete combinatorial optimization problem we employ a simple metaheuristic namely Simulated Annealing. We have also developed benchmark datasets and tested our algorithm with the dataset.