Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings Volume 2014 Issue 1, 2014
An electronic library is a computer-managed set of collections with services tailored for its use... more An electronic library is a computer-managed set of collections with services tailored for its user communities. The project team—a collaboration of four universities (Qatar University - QU, Virginia Tech, Pennsylvania State University, Texas A & M University), the Qatar National Library - QNL, and consultants—focused on the two project aims for Qatar: building community and building infrastructure (i.e., collections and information services). Thus we fit with Qatar's Thematic Pillar of Research on Computing and Information Technology, and overlap with a number of Research Grand Challenges (e.g., Cyber-security; Managing the Transition to a Diversified, Knowledge-based Society, and Culture, Arts, Heritage, Media and Language within the Arabic Context). With regard to our aim of building an electronic library community in Qatar, we have: 1. Participated in the Special Library Association Gulf Chapter, hosted in Qatar, to create awareness about electronic libraries; 2. Launched a consulting center at QU Library—with more than 30 new reference works, online educational resources, and specialized databases—and are sharing knowledge with librarians and information professionals to support those interested in collections and services; 3. Established a collaboration with Gulf Studies at QU, so we can identify and host content on this topic, and assist QU researchers and students; and 4. Collected citation-based and non-citation-based metrics (altmetrics), for Qatar and 35 nations that are competing with Qatar's annual scholarly production. We published a new approach for comparing the metrics and evaluating country-level scholarly impact. 5. Studied the evolving scholarly activities and needs of researchers in Qatar, and compared them with our findings from USA, informing ELISQ about requirements and solutions appropriate for international electronic libraries. With regard to our aim of building electronic library infrastructure in Qatar, we have built collections and provided related services: 1. Penn State's SeerSuite software is running at QU, allowing users to search the metadata and full-text of collections of PDF files from scholarly articles, e.g., QScience papers. SeerSuite gathers scholarly documents and automatically extracts metadata (authors, venues etc.) from crawled WWW content, allowing QNL and other libraries to harvest that metadata using OAI-PMH.. SeerSuite is being improved for searching on the content of the figures and tables in scholarly documents. 2. An historical collection of old Arabic documents has been assembled, indexed, and made accessible as well as data/text mined. 3. Using our QU server running Heritrix, gathered our first Arabic collection (8GB from 2,200 PDF files), from Qatari newspapers (Al-Rayah, Al-Watan, Qatar News Agency, Al-Arab, and Al-Sharq). This news collection was indexed with Apache Solr and is available for searching. Building upon the IPTC system we created a categorization system (taxonomy) for news stories, and then applied it through machine learning to train classifiers to aid browsing. 4. Both QNL and QU are building Web archives of portions of the WWW in Qatar, adapting Heritrix and the Wayback Machine, thus preserving history, culture, and Arabic content (including news, sports, government information, and university webpages) for future use and scholarly study.
Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings Volume 2014 Issue 1, 2014
This research project addresses "Human Capacity Development" which is one of Qatar'... more This research project addresses "Human Capacity Development" which is one of Qatar's Cross-cutting Research Grand Challenges. This grand challenge, which is a priority for Qatar, aims to develop sustainable talent for Qatar's knowledge economy in order to meet the needs for a high-quality workforce. As Qatar moves into the 21st century, it is important that Qatar develops its workforce to become more competitive and a model country for others to follow. At the same time, the quality of life of Qataris will be advanced. This presentation will describe a leading edge research project using emerging mobile training technologies to train workers in the oil and gas industry in Qatar. This project is funded by the Qatar National Research Fund. Subjects for this research project were employees at Qatar Petroleum. A total of 70 employees participated in this research project. The training was delivered on a variety of mobile devices which allowed employees to access the training materials from anywhere and at anytime. The research used a pre-post test design where a pre-test was administered before the employees took the training and a post-test was administered after the employees completed the training. The average percent score on the pre-test was 71 percent while the average score on the post-test was 79 percent indicating that employees' performance improved after completing the training using the flexible delivery method. In terms of the amount of time the employees spent on completing the training lesson, the time ranged from less than 30 minutes to more than three hours indicating the flexibility that mobile learning provided in training workers. In terms of where employees completed their training, 44 percent said that they completed some of the training at work and some at their home/residence; 22 percent completed the training at their home/residence; 19 percent completed the training either at work, home, or while travelling; and 15 percent completed the training at work. Again, these results show the flexibility that mobile learning provides in training. The results from this research project conducted at Qatar Petroleum show that the use of mobile technology for training workers improved performance and provides flexibility when and where workers completed their training. Delivering training using emerging mobile technology is important for the young generation of Qatari who are comfortable using mobile technology. Also, because of the flexibility of using mobile technology in training, workers can use the technology for just-in-time training so that they can apply when they learn right away which will facilitate high level learning. This research projects developed best practices for using mobile technology in training which will result in a paradigm shift in training to develop Qataris for the 21st century workforce. A well-trained Qatari workforce is important to achieve Qatar National Vision which aims at "transforming Qatar into an advanced country by 2030, capable of sustaining its own development and providing for a high standard of living for all of its people for generations to come"
2016 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2016
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society plan to re-lease their computer engineering curriculum guidelin... more ACM and the IEEE Computer Society plan to re-lease their computer engineering curriculum guidelines at the end of this calendar year. The curricular report, tagged CE2016, reflects the state-of-the-art in computer engineering education and practice that would be relevant for the coming decade. This panel presentation provides an overview of the report and it also provides unique perspectives from some steering committee members and other interested parties. The authors and participants will en-gage in discussions on ways to implement the guidelines to form new programs or to modify existing programs. The authors wel-come all audience participation including overall comments and targeted editing assistance from the computer engineering education and industry communities.
34th Annual Frontiers in Education, 2004. FIE 2004.
ABSTRACT The computer society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE-CS) ... more ABSTRACT The computer society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE-CS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) established the joint task force on Computing Curricula 2001 (CC2001) to undertake a major review of curriculum guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. The effort was to match the latest developments of computing technologies in the past decade and last through the next decade. The "Computing Curriculum 1991" and other previous efforts of the IEEE-CS and ACM did not distinguish computer science from computer engineering programs. The IEEE-CS and ACM established the computing curriculum - computer engineering (CCCE) task force in 2001 to develop a separate volume on computer engineering curricula to complement the CC2001 report. The work of the CCCE task force appears as a report available for review on the web. This report has undergone extensive review, including an NSF-sponsored workshop. By the time of this conference, the final report will have been presented to the IEEE-CS and ACM, and made available for distribution. This panel presents an overview of that report.
Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings Volume 2014 Issue 1, 2014
An electronic library is a computer-managed set of collections with services tailored for its use... more An electronic library is a computer-managed set of collections with services tailored for its user communities. The project team—a collaboration of four universities (Qatar University - QU, Virginia Tech, Pennsylvania State University, Texas A & M University), the Qatar National Library - QNL, and consultants—focused on the two project aims for Qatar: building community and building infrastructure (i.e., collections and information services). Thus we fit with Qatar's Thematic Pillar of Research on Computing and Information Technology, and overlap with a number of Research Grand Challenges (e.g., Cyber-security; Managing the Transition to a Diversified, Knowledge-based Society, and Culture, Arts, Heritage, Media and Language within the Arabic Context). With regard to our aim of building an electronic library community in Qatar, we have: 1. Participated in the Special Library Association Gulf Chapter, hosted in Qatar, to create awareness about electronic libraries; 2. Launched a consulting center at QU Library—with more than 30 new reference works, online educational resources, and specialized databases—and are sharing knowledge with librarians and information professionals to support those interested in collections and services; 3. Established a collaboration with Gulf Studies at QU, so we can identify and host content on this topic, and assist QU researchers and students; and 4. Collected citation-based and non-citation-based metrics (altmetrics), for Qatar and 35 nations that are competing with Qatar's annual scholarly production. We published a new approach for comparing the metrics and evaluating country-level scholarly impact. 5. Studied the evolving scholarly activities and needs of researchers in Qatar, and compared them with our findings from USA, informing ELISQ about requirements and solutions appropriate for international electronic libraries. With regard to our aim of building electronic library infrastructure in Qatar, we have built collections and provided related services: 1. Penn State's SeerSuite software is running at QU, allowing users to search the metadata and full-text of collections of PDF files from scholarly articles, e.g., QScience papers. SeerSuite gathers scholarly documents and automatically extracts metadata (authors, venues etc.) from crawled WWW content, allowing QNL and other libraries to harvest that metadata using OAI-PMH.. SeerSuite is being improved for searching on the content of the figures and tables in scholarly documents. 2. An historical collection of old Arabic documents has been assembled, indexed, and made accessible as well as data/text mined. 3. Using our QU server running Heritrix, gathered our first Arabic collection (8GB from 2,200 PDF files), from Qatari newspapers (Al-Rayah, Al-Watan, Qatar News Agency, Al-Arab, and Al-Sharq). This news collection was indexed with Apache Solr and is available for searching. Building upon the IPTC system we created a categorization system (taxonomy) for news stories, and then applied it through machine learning to train classifiers to aid browsing. 4. Both QNL and QU are building Web archives of portions of the WWW in Qatar, adapting Heritrix and the Wayback Machine, thus preserving history, culture, and Arabic content (including news, sports, government information, and university webpages) for future use and scholarly study.
Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings Volume 2014 Issue 1, 2014
This research project addresses "Human Capacity Development" which is one of Qatar'... more This research project addresses "Human Capacity Development" which is one of Qatar's Cross-cutting Research Grand Challenges. This grand challenge, which is a priority for Qatar, aims to develop sustainable talent for Qatar's knowledge economy in order to meet the needs for a high-quality workforce. As Qatar moves into the 21st century, it is important that Qatar develops its workforce to become more competitive and a model country for others to follow. At the same time, the quality of life of Qataris will be advanced. This presentation will describe a leading edge research project using emerging mobile training technologies to train workers in the oil and gas industry in Qatar. This project is funded by the Qatar National Research Fund. Subjects for this research project were employees at Qatar Petroleum. A total of 70 employees participated in this research project. The training was delivered on a variety of mobile devices which allowed employees to access the training materials from anywhere and at anytime. The research used a pre-post test design where a pre-test was administered before the employees took the training and a post-test was administered after the employees completed the training. The average percent score on the pre-test was 71 percent while the average score on the post-test was 79 percent indicating that employees' performance improved after completing the training using the flexible delivery method. In terms of the amount of time the employees spent on completing the training lesson, the time ranged from less than 30 minutes to more than three hours indicating the flexibility that mobile learning provided in training workers. In terms of where employees completed their training, 44 percent said that they completed some of the training at work and some at their home/residence; 22 percent completed the training at their home/residence; 19 percent completed the training either at work, home, or while travelling; and 15 percent completed the training at work. Again, these results show the flexibility that mobile learning provides in training. The results from this research project conducted at Qatar Petroleum show that the use of mobile technology for training workers improved performance and provides flexibility when and where workers completed their training. Delivering training using emerging mobile technology is important for the young generation of Qatari who are comfortable using mobile technology. Also, because of the flexibility of using mobile technology in training, workers can use the technology for just-in-time training so that they can apply when they learn right away which will facilitate high level learning. This research projects developed best practices for using mobile technology in training which will result in a paradigm shift in training to develop Qataris for the 21st century workforce. A well-trained Qatari workforce is important to achieve Qatar National Vision which aims at "transforming Qatar into an advanced country by 2030, capable of sustaining its own development and providing for a high standard of living for all of its people for generations to come"
2016 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2016
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society plan to re-lease their computer engineering curriculum guidelin... more ACM and the IEEE Computer Society plan to re-lease their computer engineering curriculum guidelines at the end of this calendar year. The curricular report, tagged CE2016, reflects the state-of-the-art in computer engineering education and practice that would be relevant for the coming decade. This panel presentation provides an overview of the report and it also provides unique perspectives from some steering committee members and other interested parties. The authors and participants will en-gage in discussions on ways to implement the guidelines to form new programs or to modify existing programs. The authors wel-come all audience participation including overall comments and targeted editing assistance from the computer engineering education and industry communities.
34th Annual Frontiers in Education, 2004. FIE 2004.
ABSTRACT The computer society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE-CS) ... more ABSTRACT The computer society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE-CS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) established the joint task force on Computing Curricula 2001 (CC2001) to undertake a major review of curriculum guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. The effort was to match the latest developments of computing technologies in the past decade and last through the next decade. The "Computing Curriculum 1991" and other previous efforts of the IEEE-CS and ACM did not distinguish computer science from computer engineering programs. The IEEE-CS and ACM established the computing curriculum - computer engineering (CCCE) task force in 2001 to develop a separate volume on computer engineering curricula to complement the CC2001 report. The work of the CCCE task force appears as a report available for review on the web. This report has undergone extensive review, including an NSF-sponsored workshop. By the time of this conference, the final report will have been presented to the IEEE-CS and ACM, and made available for distribution. This panel presents an overview of that report.
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