- Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
Abstract. With the enormous auspices and resources EU research projects are receiving to enable the diffusion of lightweight service composition approaches among end users, it is imperative for these projects to understand and establish... more
Abstract. With the enormous auspices and resources EU research projects are receiving to enable the diffusion of lightweight service composition approaches among end users, it is imperative for these projects to understand and establish the correct user requirements that lead to development of easy to use and effective software platforms. To this end, a user-centric study which includes 15 participants is carried out to unravel users ’ perception of software services and service composition, their working ways, and identify users ’ expectations and usability problems of a future service composition tool. Several examples and prototypes are used to steer this elicitation study, among which is a simple composition tool designed to support non-programmers to create interactive service-based applications in a lightweight and visual manner. Although a high user acceptance emerged in regard to “developing service-based applications by users”, there is evidence of a fundamental issue conce...
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Nowadays universities pay considerable attention to the use of websites to enhance the education process through the delivery of important information. The general aim of a website is to attract more target users. However, a poor website... more
Nowadays universities pay considerable attention to the use of websites to enhance the education process through the delivery of important information. The general aim of a website is to attract more target users. However, a poor website leads to fewer visits, less efficiency and less satisfaction from users. The present study explores the effects of four key factors including system usefulness, interface quality, content and satisfaction of users on the perceived usability of Algerian educational websites. A total of 200 students were tasked with four interaction tasks and subsequently asked to complete a usability questionnaire, consisting of 19 usability questions. Results indicate that the website usability perceptions amongst university website users are significantly affected by all four factors. In particular, website usefulness, information quality, interface quality and overall satisfaction all require more attention for the design of effective Arabic educational websites. ...
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Research Interests:
Community-based traveler information systems have become prevalent in our daily life to help people commute from one location to another. Despite the perceived benefits of these systems, such as sustainability and green transportation,... more
Community-based traveler information systems have become prevalent in our daily life to help people commute from one location to another. Despite the perceived benefits of these systems, such as sustainability and green transportation, the literature still lacks studies about how such systems are used and their impact on promoting sustainable travel decisions and behaviors. This research investigates the current use of two popular traveler information systems, namely Waze (a crowdsourcing navigation app) and BlaBlaCar (a car-pooling website and app). More precisely, this paper identifies commuters’ use of such systems, the real challenges that hinder the adoption of such systems, and the factors leading to the successful adoption of traveler information systems. To this end, we conducted an exploratory study that involved collecting and analyzing 257 real commuting critical incidents through several online channels. The inductive thematic analysis of these commuting stories resulted...
This paper proposes and presents the details of an agent-based architecture that has the capacity to model, simulate the movement of, and guide crowds with panic behavior in highly-dense areas in the events of manmade and natural threats.... more
This paper proposes and presents the details of an agent-based architecture that has the capacity to model, simulate the movement of, and guide crowds with panic behavior in highly-dense areas in the events of manmade and natural threats. The most populated human gathering in the world, the Muslim pilgrimage event (also known as Hajj) which attracts more than two million people in six days is chosen to guide the identification of the requirements and main concepts of the agent simulation. The inferred requirements are used to guide the selection of an appropriate simulation tool following an extensive survey of potential simulation tools. The architecture uses software agents to represent groups of people along with their real time characteristics such as density, movements and panic levels, collected from various data sources. Support vector machine is combined with the fuzzy logic theory to predict pilgrims' behaviors and movements in case of panic situations. Initial simulati...
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the private-data pertaining to the interaction of users with social media applications that can be recovered from second-hand Android devices. Design/methodology/approach This study uses... more
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the private-data pertaining to the interaction of users with social media applications that can be recovered from second-hand Android devices. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a black-box testing-principles based methodology to develop use-cases that simulate real-world case-scenarios of the activities performed by the users on the social media application. The authors executed these use-cases in a controlled experiment and examined the Android smartphone to recover the private-data pertaining to these use-cases. Findings The results suggest that the social media data recovered from Android devices can reveal a complete timeline of activities performed by the user, identify all the videos watched, uploaded, shared and deleted by the user, disclose the username and user-id of the user, unveil the email addresses used by the user to download the application and share the videos with other users and expose the social networ...
When designed, technologies and frameworks are not created to be as dynamic and flexible as to cater to the requirements of other domains, and so is the case with Blockchain technology. Specifically designed for cryptocurrency, Blockchain... more
When designed, technologies and frameworks are not created to be as dynamic and flexible as to cater to the requirements of other domains, and so is the case with Blockchain technology. Specifically designed for cryptocurrency, Blockchain was not intended to be used in other domains. However, during the past few years, critics argued that Blockchain has the potential to deal with some unique requirements like confidentiality and immutability and can therefore be deployed in several areas other than cryptocurrency. The use of Blockchain to support Accounting Information Systems (AIS) through enterprise resource planning (ERP) is another motivating domain to investigate in this research. ERP is another promising technology that has gained significant attention across the globe. In this research, a hybrid solution is proposed to ensure AIS data integrity against any deliberate attempt or mala-fide intention for alteration or deletion from the database that can be verified at any later ...
The number of online users accessing websites and consuming online services via their desktop and mobile browsers is on a constant rise. This paper coins and discusses the concept of web design scraping, which primarily promotes the idea... more
The number of online users accessing websites and consuming online services via their desktop and mobile browsers is on a constant rise. This paper coins and discusses the concept of web design scraping, which primarily promotes the idea of extracting, understanding, and modeling website components and characteristics and thereby inferring the meaning of the web design. Moreover, web design scraping emphasizes the role of state-of-the-art computing technologies and approaches, especially those powered by machine learning, in consolidating the understanding and intelligent construction and customization of website interfaces. Moreover, this paper discusses several enabling factors for web design scraping and recommends four research directions. The most notable research trends focus on the prediction of user satisfaction towards personalized web designs and the smart revamping of websites automatically by applying machine learning techniques that learn from the interaction history, preferences, and habits of online users.
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Recently, the concept of combining ‘things’ on the Internet to provide various services has gained tremendous momentum. Such a concept has also impacted the automotive industry, giving rise to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV enables... more
Recently, the concept of combining ‘things’ on the Internet to provide various services has gained tremendous momentum. Such a concept has also impacted the automotive industry, giving rise to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV enables Internet connectivity and communication between smart vehicles and other devices on the network. Shifting the computing towards the edge of the network reduces communication delays and provides various services instantly. However, both distributed (i.e., edge computing) and central computing (i.e., cloud computing) architectures suffer from several inherent issues, such as high latency, high infrastructure cost, and performance degradation. We propose a novel concept of computation, which we call moisture computing (MC) to be deployed slightly away from the edge of the network but below the cloud infrastructure. The MC-based IoV architecture can be used to assist smart vehicles in collaborating to solve traffic monitoring, road safety, and management...
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Research Interests:
Cloud computing is the emerging platform that is covering individual and corporate needs swiftly. The spread of this global platform is ranging from infrastructure to various middleware, front-end and backend services. At corporate level,... more
Cloud computing is the emerging platform that is covering individual and corporate needs swiftly. The spread of this global platform is ranging from infrastructure to various middleware, front-end and backend services. At corporate level, another effective configuration of this phenomenon is multi-cloud environment, which is depicting the ultimate control of the end-user on engaging services from various cloud service providers depending on the service ranking, cost and availability. It is therefore, now very much desirable to have infrastructure services from one service provider while data services are performed on another cloud or having infrastructure services in a distributed environment on multiple clouds. Multi-cloud environment is closely linked with smartly configured security mechanism to ensure the security at rest and in transit. Intrusion detection at various levels and services of cloud platform is not an easy task and when it is spread over multiple clouds then the ch...
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Research Interests:
The use and coordination of multiple modes of travel efficiently, although beneficial, remains an overarching challenge for urban cities. This paper implements a distributed architecture of an eco-friendly transport guidance system by... more
The use and coordination of multiple modes of travel efficiently, although beneficial, remains an overarching challenge for urban cities. This paper implements a distributed architecture of an eco-friendly transport guidance system by employing the agent-based paradigm. The paradigm uses software agents to model and represent the complex transport infrastructure of urban environments, including roads, buses, trolleybuses, metros, trams, bicycles, and walking. The system exploits live traffic data (e.g., traffic flow, density, and CO2 emissions) collected from multiple data sources (e.g., road sensors and SCOOT) to provide multimodal route recommendations for travelers through a dedicated application. Moreover, the proposed system empowers the transport management authorities to monitor the traffic flow and conditions of a city in real-time through a dedicated web visualization. We exhibit the advantages of using different types of agents to represent the versatile nature of transpor...
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The prediction of student academic performance has drawn considerable attention in education. However, although the learning outcomes are believed to improve learning and teaching, prognosticating the attainment of student outcomes... more
The prediction of student academic performance has drawn considerable attention in education. However, although the learning outcomes are believed to improve learning and teaching, prognosticating the attainment of student outcomes remains underexplored. A decade of research work conducted between 2010 and November 2020 was surveyed to present a fundamental understanding of the intelligent techniques used for the prediction of student performance, where academic success is strictly measured using student learning outcomes. The electronic bibliographic databases searched include ACM, IEEE Xplore, Google Scholar, Science Direct, Scopus, Springer, and Web of Science. Eventually, we synthesized and analyzed a total of 62 relevant papers with a focus on three perspectives, (1) the forms in which the learning outcomes are predicted, (2) the predictive analytics models developed to forecast student learning, and (3) the dominant factors impacting student outcomes. The best practices for co...
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Research Interests:
Measuring the effectiveness of a continuous quality improvement cycle in education is a cumbersome and sophisticated process. This article contributes a comprehensive self-assessment instrument for identifying the strengths and weaknesses... more
Measuring the effectiveness of a continuous quality improvement cycle in education is a cumbersome and sophisticated process. This article contributes a comprehensive self-assessment instrument for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of all phases of a continuous quality improvement cycle, including planning, data collection, analysis and reporting, and implementation of improvements. To this end, a four round Delphi study soliciting a total of 23 program quality experts from four universities was conducted. The produced survey instrument contains a total of 50 questions. The instrument may be used by quality experts in education to judge the quality of their continuous quality improvement cycle that endeavours to assess the attainment of learning outcomes in various undergraduate educational programs. Moreover, the instrument could be exploited to infer relevant user and system requirements and guide the development of an automated self-assessment tool aimed at identifying the...
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Research Interests:
ABSTRACT A common understanding of business documents is important for realizing interoperability among collaborating enterprises. In this paper we report on the design and evaluation of a system that can help collaborating enterprises to... more
ABSTRACT A common understanding of business documents is important for realizing interoperability among collaborating enterprises. In this paper we report on the design and evaluation of a system that can help collaborating enterprises to efficiently recognise and align business documents (e.g. incoming emails and attachments) according to the enterprises’ local document repository. The system relies on the interplay between automatic recognition of business documents and human intervention by means of an assistive mapping tool. Our findings show that the balance between automatic recognition and human intervention ensures greater levels of accuracy in the system. We evaluate our system from both usability and accuracy perspectives and argue that some of the lessons learned and design decisions we took are applicable to the general mixed initiative tools for end user support.
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... Usman Wajid, Abdallah Namoune, Nikolay Mehandjiev Manchester Business School The University of Manchester United Kingdom {firstname.lastname ... An interesting example of service composition is Yahoo Pipes!3, which enables users to... more
... Usman Wajid, Abdallah Namoune, Nikolay Mehandjiev Manchester Business School The University of Manchester United Kingdom {firstname.lastname ... An interesting example of service composition is Yahoo Pipes!3, which enables users to combine various information ...
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This paper reports some reflections on the users' mental models of web services and service composition. This knowledge was elicited from two studies involving individual semi-structured interviews and group discussion. In... more
This paper reports some reflections on the users' mental models of web services and service composition. This knowledge was elicited from two studies involving individual semi-structured interviews and group discussion. In particular, we focus on what end-users, with no formal programming background, understand about web-services and how they view service composition at the presentation layer. The results showed a high user acceptance towards a simple authoring tool dedicated to building their own service-based ...
Ordinary web users can now create and publish online content. They even venture into “mashups,” integrating information from different sources into a composite information-providing web service. This is a non-trivial design task, which... more
Ordinary web users can now create and publish online content. They even venture into “mashups,” integrating information from different sources into a composite information-providing web service. This is a non-trivial design task, which falls into the area of end-user development when the ordinary users who perform it do not have programming education. In this article, we investigate the service design strategies of 12 such ordinary users and compare them against the baseline of 12 programmers. In our think-aloud study, users completed two contrasting types of tasks involved in developing service-based applications: (a) manual service composition and (b) parametric design using templates with a high degree of software support (or assisted composition). These service composition tasks were chosen to differ in respect to the level of user support provided by the tool. Our findings show that non-programmers liked, more than programmers, the template-based parametric design and did not f...
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ABSTRACT Our cities are struggling. Increasing growth in urban cohabitation has strained cities’ systems and infrastructural capacity, especially in regards to the transport domain. This paper investigates the impact which mobile... more
ABSTRACT Our cities are struggling. Increasing growth in urban cohabitation has strained cities’ systems and infrastructural capacity, especially in regards to the transport domain. This paper investigates the impact which mobile information systems can have on travelling behaviour. In our investigation we employ Occy, a simple web-based mobile application which provides bus timetable information to commuters. In this study, we studied the adoption, usefulness and impact of Occy on users’ commuting behavior over a three week period through a diary study which included 25 participants on one of the busiest bus corridors in the UK. This was consolidated by a separate focus group, which included 8 participants, to shed light on participants’ acceptance of Occy as an intervention for altering their travel behaviour and improving travel experience. The results show that transport information delivered through Occy did influence the behaviour of travellers, who started trusting the system and used it to target specific busses and thus reduce their bus waiting times. The follow-up discussions identified the features of flexibility and trust as crucial to the successful adoption of such mobile applications.
... 12. Sune Alstrup Johansen , John Paulin Hansen, Do we need eye trackers to tell where people look?, CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human ... 15. Bing Pan , Helene A. Hembrooke , Geri K. Gay ,Laura A. Granka ,... more
... 12. Sune Alstrup Johansen , John Paulin Hansen, Do we need eye trackers to tell where people look?, CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human ... 15. Bing Pan , Helene A. Hembrooke , Geri K. Gay ,Laura A. Granka , Matthew K. Feusner , Jill K. Newman, The determinants of web ...
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... Manchester Business School, Booth Street East, Manchester, M13 9SS, United Kingdom {abdallah.namoune,usman.wajid,nikolay.mehandjiev}@mbs.ac ... a single web-based application using specialized mash-up editors, such as: Open Mashups... more
... Manchester Business School, Booth Street East, Manchester, M13 9SS, United Kingdom {abdallah.namoune,usman.wajid,nikolay.mehandjiev}@mbs.ac ... a single web-based application using specialized mash-up editors, such as: Open Mashups Studio [12] and Yahoo!Pipes [15 ...
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... Development by Ordinary End Users and IT Professionals Abdallah Namoun, Usman Wajid, and Nikolay Mehandjiev Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9SS, UK firstname.lastname@mbs.ac.uk Abstract. ...... more
... Development by Ordinary End Users and IT Professionals Abdallah Namoun, Usman Wajid, and Nikolay Mehandjiev Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9SS, UK firstname.lastname@mbs.ac.uk Abstract. ... Following this, Yahoo! ...
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ABSTRACT In the original service-oriented view of software provision, loosely-coupled services are brought together at the time of need and unbound immediately following execution, allowing service procurers to focus on selecting services... more
ABSTRACT In the original service-oriented view of software provision, loosely-coupled services are brought together at the time of need and unbound immediately following execution, allowing service procurers to focus on selecting services that best correspond to their evolving requirements. This just-in-time approach requires the assessment of quality properties of both the software and the service provision activity in order to judge candidate services. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a multi-perspective quality evaluation model tuned to the needs of this "just-in-time" service provision vision. The proposed model uses a hierarchal structure of the quality features that characterize both the software and its provision arrangements from the perspectives of different stakeholders in the service provisioning and consumption process. The development and evaluation reported here took place in two phases: a "role playing" user study involving 15 participants to elicit the suitability, applicability and measurability of quality characteristics; and a contextual interview involving 24 users (12 software professionals and 12 general users) to uncover their mental models towards quality and evaluate the resultant characteristics identified from the first study. Our findings were twofold. Firstly, we show that a broader range of considerations encompassing both service quality and quality of service must be accounted for when dealing with software services (e.g. service functionality and service responsiveness). Secondly, we identify and explore the users' mental model of quality within the service-oriented paradigm.
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ABSTRACT This paper describes an integrated approach for modeling transport infrastructure and optimising transport in urban areas. It combines the benefits of a multi-agent system, real time traffic information, and traffic forecasts to... more
ABSTRACT This paper describes an integrated approach for modeling transport infrastructure and optimising transport in urban areas. It combines the benefits of a multi-agent system, real time traffic information, and traffic forecasts to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and offer flexible intermodal commuting solutions. In this distributed approach, segments of different modes of transport (e.g. roads, bus/tram routes, bicycle routes, pedestrian paths) are simulated by intelligent transport agents to create a rich multi-layer transport network. Moreover, a user agent enables direct interaction between commuters’ mobile devices and the multi-agent system to submit journey requests. The approach capitalises on real-time traffic updates and historical travel patterns, such as CO2 emissions, vehicles’ average speed, and traffic flow, detected from various traffic data sources, and future forecasts of commuting behaviour delivered via a traffic radar to calculate intermodal route solutions whilst considering commuter preferences.
ABSTRACT Building an appropriate mathematical model that describes the system behaviour with a certain degree of satisfaction is quite challenging owing to the uncertain and volatile nature of thermodynamic constants and geometric... more
ABSTRACT Building an appropriate mathematical model that describes the system behaviour with a certain degree of satisfaction is quite challenging owing to the uncertain and volatile nature of thermodynamic constants and geometric parameters. In this paper, we present a technique to approximate and validate the dynamic behaviour of the Aström–Bell boiler-turbine power plant based on an RBFNN over a large operating range. The proposed RBFNN is applied to solve the parametric identification problem for nonlinear and complex systems using an optimiser based on a hybrid genetic algorithm. This optimiser is composed of the gradient descent optimiser and a genetic algorithm for fast convergence. Two simulations were performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed technique under different situations with several boiler-turbine input variables. The optimal structure and parameters of the obtained RBFNN-based model emulates well the dynamic behaviour of the Aström–Bell boiler-turbine system. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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ABSTRACT A common understanding of business documents is important for realizing interoperability among collaborating enterprises. In this paper we report on the design and evaluation of a system that can help collaborating enterprises to... more
ABSTRACT A common understanding of business documents is important for realizing interoperability among collaborating enterprises. In this paper we report on the design and evaluation of a system that can help collaborating enterprises to efficiently recognise and align business documents (e.g. incoming emails and attachments) according to the enterprises’ local document repository. The system relies on the interplay between automatic recognition of business documents and human intervention by means of an assistive mapping tool. Our findings show that the balance between automatic recognition and human intervention ensures greater levels of accuracy in the system. We evaluate our system from both usability and accuracy perspectives and argue that some of the lessons learned and design decisions we took are applicable to the general mixed initiative tools for end user support.
Research Interests:
In their 1957 paper, Theodore W. Rall, Earl W. Sutherland, and Jacques Berthet announced the landmark discovery of the biological activity of cy-clic AMP (CAMP) and its role as a second messen-ger, They were studying the activation of... more
In their 1957 paper, Theodore W. Rall, Earl W. Sutherland, and Jacques Berthet announced the landmark discovery of the biological activity of cy-clic AMP (CAMP) and its role as a second messen-ger, They were studying the activation of liver phosphorylase (the key initial ...
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... Usman Wajid1, Nikolay Mehandjiev3, Abdallah Namoun4 The ... When the user finishes the annotation session, (s)he classifies the document (eg as purchase request, invoice etc) and propagates this classification to the external... more
... Usman Wajid1, Nikolay Mehandjiev3, Abdallah Namoun4 The ... When the user finishes the annotation session, (s)he classifies the document (eg as purchase request, invoice etc) and propagates this classification to the external DocumentType/core components ...
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Users' visual attention measured by eyetracking fixations was investigated in web pages with different designs. Browsing and search conditions were tested. Layout structure influenced attention with fixation densities being concentrated... more
Users' visual attention measured by eyetracking fixations was investigated in web pages with different designs. Browsing and search conditions were tested. Layout structure influenced attention with fixation densities being concentrated in upper parts of pages according to the layout structure. In sites with open graphical layouts, animations and images dominated attention. In the search condition, attention patterns focused on salient objects and information-scent components leading to the targets. Based on the results, a model of structured directed visual attention was proposed and implemented in the Web Page Analyser tool (WPA) to predict heat maps of visual attention. Validation of the tool demonstrated good accuracy in browse and search modes.
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Fault detection in stochastic dynamical systems is usually carried out by the generation of residuals directly reflecting the magnitude of the faults. For this purpose, faults indicator is used to evaluate possible deviations from the... more
Fault detection in stochastic dynamical systems is usually carried out by the generation of residuals directly reflecting the magnitude of the faults. For this purpose, faults indicator is used to evaluate possible deviations from the normal operating conditions and the measurements of the system. This evaluation is often very difficult to implement in the multi-faults case. This article aims to
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Understanding the meaning and the type of a business document received by a company is important in order to determine an appropriate response. We have developed a visual tool allowing ordinary users to express mappings between arriving... more
Understanding the meaning and the type of a business document received by a company is important in order to determine an appropriate response. We have developed a visual tool allowing ordinary users to express mappings between arriving documents and their elements on one side and the different document types on the other. The tool is used to set up and
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Service composition is a process of developing service-based applications that combine the functionality and features from multiple service providers in a unified solution. In this paper we report on a study aimed to gauge users’ views... more
Service composition is a process of developing service-based applications that combine the functionality and features from multiple service providers in a unified solution. In this paper we report on a study aimed to gauge users’ views and perceptions about traditional service composition approaches (such as control flow and data flow-based composition approaches) versus a system assisted composition approach. User preferences and opinions are obtained from a set of focus groups that aimed at exploring the mental model of end-users about the way they would prefer to develop service-based applications. The results of user studies are being used in the design of an easy to use service-based application development tool in the EC funded SOA4All project.