Guidelines for digital storytelling for Arab children

Children are getting more exposed to various technologies in teaching-learning. Various types of teaching-learning have been designed, including interactive digital storytelling. In Malaysia, local children have been clear about story-based learning materials. However, the situation is a little bit different with Arab children. Because the number of Arab children migrating into Malaysia is increasing, for following their parents who are studying at higher levels, they have to also make themselves familiar with the local scenario. In accordance, this study is initiates, to identify their acceptance towards story-based learning materials, or specifically interactive digital storytelling. Hence, this study reacts proactively, by approaching Arab children asking for their feedback on whether they have any desire for interactive digital storytelling. Through a series of interviews, this study found that they have a strong desire and tendency. Then, the following objectives have been stated: (1) to determine the components for the interactive digital storytelling for Arab children, (2) to design and develop a prototype of the interactive digital storytelling, and (3) to observe on how the Arab children experience the interactive digital storytelling. User-centered design (UCD) approach has been gone through in ensuring that the objectives are achieved. The process of determining the components for the interactive digital storytelling was carried out by directly involving Arab children and their teachers from three preschools in Changlun and Sintok. It was similar with the efforts in determining the contents, and interface design until the prototype development. Having the prototype ready, user testing was carried out to explore the way Arab children experience the prototype. All the processes involved various techniques through observation, interviews, and noting. Specifically, the user testing involved qualitative and empirical data. Qualitative data were gathered through observation, meanwhile the empirical data were gathered using Computer System Usability Questionnaire (CSUQ) tool. In the end, having data processed, the findings show that Arab children are highly satisfied with the prototype. Scientifically, the developed prototype is a mirror of the obtained guidelines, obtained through the UCD seminars. Hence, the positive acceptance on the prototype reflects positive acceptance on the guidelines, as the main contribution of this study. Besides the guidelines as the main contribution of this study, the developed prototype is also a wonderful contribution to the Arab children and their teacher. They will be using it as part of their teaching and learning material

Building a Resilient Cancer Healthcare System Using Resources Management Reallocation: A System Dynamics Modeling Approach

Masteroppgave i systemdynamikkGEO-SD351INTL-PSYKINTL-JUSINTL-SVINTL-HFINTL-KMDINTL-MEDINTL-MNMASV-SYSD

Defenses Against Perception-Layer Attacks on IoT Smart Furniture for Impaired People

[EN] Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming highly supportive in innovative technological solutions for assisting impaired people. Some of these IoT solutions are still in a prototyping phase ignoring possible attacks and the corresponding security defenses. This article proposes a learning-based approach for defending against perception-layer attacks performed on specific sensor types in smart furniture for impaired people. This approach is based on the analysis of time series by means of dynamic time warping algorithm for calculating similarity and a novel detector for identifying anomalies. This approach has been illustrated by defending against simulated perception-layer magnetic attacks on a smart cupboard with door magnetic sensors. The results show the performance of the proposed approach for properly identifying these attacks. In particular, these results advocate an accuracy about 95.5% per day.This work was supported in part by the research project Utilisation of IoT and Sensors in Smart Cities for Improving Quality of Life of Impaired People under Grant 52-2020, in part by the Ciudades Inteligentes Totalmente Integrales, Eficientes Y Sotenibles (CITIES) funded by the Programa Iberoamericano de Ciencia y Tecnologia para el Desarrollo (CYTED) under Grant 518RT0558, in part by the Diseno Colaborativo Para La Promocion Del Bienestar En Ciudades Inteligentes Inclusivas under Grant TIN2017-88327-R funded by the Spanish Council of Science, Innovation and Universities from the Spanish Government, and in part by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad in the Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnica de Excelencia, Subprograma Estatal de Generacion de Conocimiento under Grant TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P.Nasralla, MM.; García-Magariño, I.; Lloret, J. (2020). Defenses Against Perception-Layer Attacks on IoT Smart Furniture for Impaired People. IEEE Access. 8:119795-119805. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3004814S119795119805

Energy-Efficient Software-Defined AWGR-Based PON Data Center Network

In this paper, we present our results on tackling the oversubscription issue in the inter-cell communication in the Arrayed Waveguide PON based data center architecture proposed in our recent work. We enhance the bandwidth allocation by introducing 2-tiers of AWGRs to facilitate multipath routing and energy-efficient utilisation of resources. We also employ a centralized Software Defined Network (SDN) control and management system to coordinate and arbitrate the channel access for communication through the OLT links with PONs via wavelength reconfiguration and energy-efficient grooming. A benchmarking study between the proposed SDN architecture against the decentralized conventional design shows that with the SDN enabled architecture, the power consumption can be decreased by up to 90% for typical average data rates while maintaining zero blocking

A Repository of Method Fragments for Agent-Oriented Development of Learning-Based Edge Computing Systems

[EN] The upcoming avenue of IoT, with its massive generated data, makes it really hard to train centralized systems with machine learning in real time. This problem can be addressed with learning-based edge computing systems where the learning is performed in a distributed way on the nodes. In particular, this work focuses on developing multi-agent systems for implementing learning-based edge computing systems. The diversity of methodologies in agent-oriented software engineering reflects the complexity of developing multi-agent systems. The division of the development processes into method fragments facilitates the application of agent-oriented methodologies and their study. In this line of research, this work proposes a database for implementing a repository of method fragments considering the development of learning-based edge computing systems and the information recommended by the FIPA technical committee. This repository makes method fragments available from different methodologies, and computerizes certain metrics and queries over the existing method fragments. This work compares the performance of several combinations of dimensionality reduction methods and machine learning techniques (i.e., support vector regression, k-nearest neighbors, and multi-layer perceptron neural networks) in a simulator of a learning-based edge computing system for estimating profits and customers.The authors acknowledge PSU Smart Systems Engineering Lab, project "Utilisation of IoT and sensors in smart cities for improving quality of life of impaired people" (ref. 52-2020), CYTED (ref. 518RT0558), and the Spanish Council of Science, Innovation and Universities (TIN2017-88327-R).García-Magariño, I.; Nasralla, MM.; Lloret, J. (2021). A Repository of Method Fragments for Agent-Oriented Development of Learning-Based Edge Computing Systems. IEEE Network. 35(1):156-162. https://doi.org/10.1109/MNET.011.2000296S15616235

Engineering Characteristics of Loess

Civil Engineerin

Disaster Resilient Optical Core Networks

During the past few years, the number of catastrophic disasters has increased and its impact sometimes incapacitates the infrastructures within a region. The communication network infrastructure is one of the affected systems during these events. Thus, building a resilient network backbone is essential due to the big role of networks during disaster recovery operations. In this thesis, the research efforts in building a disaster-resilient network are reviewed and open issues related to building disaster-resilient networks are discussed. Large size disasters not necessarily impact the communication networks, but instead it can stimulate events that cause network performance degradation. In this regard, two open challenges that arise after disasters are considered one is the short-term capacity exhaustion and the second is the power outage. First, the post-disaster traffic floods phenomena is considered. The impact of the traffic floods on the optical core network performance is studied. Five mitigation approaches are proposed to serve these floods and minimise the incurred blocking. The proposed approaches explore different technologies such as excess or overprovisioned capacity exploitation, traffic filtering, protection paths rerouting, rerouting all traffic and finally using the degrees of freedom offered by differentiated services. The mitigation approaches succeeded in reducing the disaster induced traffic blocking. Second, advance reservation provisioning in an energy-efficient approach is developed. Four scenarios are considered to minimise power consumption. The scenarios exploit the flexibility provided by the sliding-window advance reservation requests. This flexibility is studied through scheduling and rescheduling scenarios. The proposed scenarios succeeded in minimising the consumed power. Third, the sliding-window flexibility is exploited for the objective of minimising network blocking during post-disaster traffic floods. The scheduling and rescheduling scenarios are extended to overcome the capacity exhaustion and improve the network blocking. The proposed schemes minimised the incurred blocking during traffic floods by exploiting sliding window. Fourth, building blackout resilient networks is proposed. The network performance during power outages is evaluated. A remedy approach is suggested for maximising network lifetime during blackouts. The approach attempts to reduce the required backup power supply while minimising network outages due to limited energy production. The results show that the mitigation approach succeeds in keeping the network alive during a blackout while minimising the required backup power

Toxoplasmosis in Pregnancy: Diagnosis, Risk Factors, and Management

Toxoplasma gondiiis an opportunistic parasitic protozoan infection. Toxoplasmosis is the most common food-borne infection throughout the world. In pregnancy, fetal complications range from abortion, physically-disabled children to fetal demise. This review examined risk factors diagnosis and treatment of Toxoplasma gondii during pregnancy pregnant.Pregnant women contract the infection through contaminated food, unpasteurized milk and proximity with infected animals most commonly cats. Recent evident have demonstrated the benefit of screening and treatment for toxoplasmosis duringperiod of pregnancyby decreasing vertical transmission of the Toxoplasma gondiiparasite to the growing fetus. There are several ways for pregnant women to protect themselves from contracting the disease during pregnancy. In this review, we discussed diagnosis, prevention, and management of toxoplasmosis during pregnancy