Quranic education and technology : reinforcement learning system for non-native Arabic children

We built a simulator based on reinforcement learning to improve teaching experience in Quranic and Islamic education for non-native Arabic speakers to evaluate their strength and weaknesses and allow the system to help improving the child in one hand, and provide an accurate actual report for each child on the other hand

An explainable machine learning framework for lung cancer hospital length of stay prediction

This work introduces a predictive Length of Stay (LOS) framework for lung cancer patients using machine learning (ML) models. The framework proposed to deal with imbalanced datasets for classification-based approaches using electronic healthcare records (EHR). We have utilized supervised ML methods to predict lung cancer inpatients LOS during ICU hospitalization using the MIMIC-III dataset. Random Forest (RF) Model outperformed other models and achieved predicted results during the three framework phases. With clinical significance features selection, over-sampling methods (SMOTE and ADASYN) achieved the highest AUC results (98% with CI 95%: 95.3–100%, and 100% respectively). The combination of Over-sampling and under-sampling achieved the second-highest AUC results (98%, with CI 95%: 95.3–100%, and 97%, CI 95%: 93.7–100% SMOTE-Tomek, and SMOTE-ENN respectively). Under-sampling methods reported the least important AUC results (50%, with CI 95%: 40.2–59.8%) for both (ENN and Tomek- Links). Using ML explainable technique called SHAP, we explained the outcome of the predictive model (RF) with SMOTE class balancing technique to understand the most significant clinical features that contributed to predicting lung cancer LOS with the RF model. Our promising framework allows us to employ ML techniques in-hospital clinical information systems to predict lung cancer admissions into ICU

Connecting people, technology and environment by disrupting design curriculum : highlights on today industrial design vision to raise technology innovators and creative entrepreneurial leaders

This paper highlights eight sets of principles and variables the author used leading his industrial design team to reconnect academia with changing students and industry, and implement the vision for their present course curriculum makeover. The current post-industrial era marks a time for a new kind of design that should bond people, technology and environment better. Meanwhile constructivist, de-constructivist, and recently, connectivist discourses have eclipsed concepts on what is good design and challenged traditional design education. The task of raising creative professionals through design thinking and experimentation is further challenged by economic rationalism dogma of viability, speed and profit margins

International Industrial Design Studio project: design for development in the era of collaborative networks

This paper reports on the progress and Australian findings relating to an international collaborative and distributed industrial design studio project extending over four years between universities in Australia, the Americas and more recently Europe. Primarily the project was run from a third year industrial design studio unit at UWS and later it benchmarked Australian students with counterparts elsewhere in Canada (Alberta University) and Chile (Metropolitan University of Technology, UTEM). While this is an ongoing project that is still to reveal more results, this paper builds on previous reports explaining more precise structural and technical details to extrapolate lessons learnt and offer some of its main outcomes to others. The experience so far has already highlighted important issues relating to collaborative networks, social capital and future implications for design, education and manufacturing beyond functionalist paradigm

Designing for social interaction through physical play, movement and learning

This paper reports on two related but different developments in relation to designing for social interaction. It intends to compare and link together both a four years old international collaborative industrial design and manufacturing studio project between three universities and a users' observational research of pre-school children for five years in a community based toy library located in one of the most cosmopolitan suburbs in the state of New South Wales. It has surfaced there are similar cultural and social constraints influencing child development as well as the designing of products directed towards social interaction through physical play, movement and learning

Innovating industrial design curriculum in a knowledge-based, participatory and digital era

This article discusses three years’ research (2012-2014) on design education towards a 2016 undergraduate industrial design curriculum launch. It contributes a pathway for conservative courses towards design culture transformation and filling gaps between them and leading breakthrough education exemplars. The course proposes a collective knowledge creation model through social constructivism and constructionism that recognises its place in time and history and allows customisation to individual upbringing. It catches up with a profession transformed beyond a digital Bauhaus manifesto that joined and revaluated physical and digital artefacts as per their environment, quality of experiences, intelligence, networks and relations. Data and findings supported pedagogy redefinition from master-apprentice and teacher-centred skill transmission models to heutagogy and paragogy. The new approach required habitus change from a traditional goods-centred discipline to human-centred focus, critical design and making, design heuristics, CDIO (conceiving, designing, implementing, operating) and STEAM (science, technology, arts, mathematics) frameworks. Participants empathetically contextualised, problem framed and solved by crossing boundaries between disciplines, institutions, industries, students’ background and society. Research and practice promoted new forms of industrial design creation happening in physical and digital coexisting spaces of being. Course units evolved around an e-curriculum component working as a digital spine. Curriculum progressed from standard top-down transmission to sociotechnical and organisational networking, industry collaboration, international design studio and Design Factory model-like projects. In doing so, it became a foundation for future physical-digital industrial design artefacts, human computer interaction, machine learning, hacker culture systems, shared information, free open-source software and hardware development within a 4.0 industrial revolution

International collaborative design studio project : preparing industrial design students for the global emerging economy. Part 3

This paper reports on recent developments on an international collaborative industrial design studio project entering its fourth year of existence between three universities in three different countries. Run from a third year design studio unit at University of Western Sydney (UWS), the project benchmarks Australian students with counterparts in Canada (Alberta University) and Chile (Metropolitan University of Technology). Thanks to using latest design, communication, prototyping and simulation technologies, it focuses on challenges to education to achieve intended learning outcomes confronted with issues of globalisation, heterogeneous base and retention constrains; university as gatekeeper of professional standards while confronted with technological changes and new distributed professional, manufacturing and production developments; research on teaching and learning, new methodologies and process relating to design, manufacturing, implementation and delivery of products and services; development of new dynamics of work and production through distributed means of communication and manufacturing (internationalisation and globalisation of design)

To ipadise or to ipedise higher education : new learning and the challenge of diversity in users, space, time, devices and formats

Higher education institutions started studies on how to use iPads as soon as Apple released them back on 2010. That was a breakthrough technology “poised to change the learning landscape.” Its capacity to carry content and thousands of inexpensive apps made it a perfect choice. Interfacing through a multi-touch screen was intuitive and inspiring of creativity and hands-on learning. Its small size was unobtrusive and portable. iPads quickly became appreciated commodity and dominated a newly created market with no rival for a couple of years. It was timely as technology used in classrooms was often inappropriate or dated while the new students were digital natives. It seemed they were more familiar with technology than many academics and had easier access to new devices. iPad implementation brought about puzzling challenges to institutions as better infrastructure, methods and curriculum were needed to house the new thinking and doing. Fast forward to 2013, the learning technology landscape is changing quickly. Apple paved the way so now new competitors (i.e. Windows, Samsung, Asus, Sony and others) are gaining pieces of the market. Complications created by industry and manufacturers competition added on to the upheaval on how to still figure out and deliver discipline specific education; core curriculum and who are our new learners. Extra pressure is amounting as the author’s university just started a new strong blended learning strategy by giving away 11,000 new iPads to each first year freshman and woman entering the institution in 2013. This move to action created a dramatic shift in paradigms intending to enhance students learning experience who appear to want everything faster and easier than in previous generations. Relevance of teaching, learning and creative inquiry can only be achieved thanks to a process of authenticity that caters for all diversity in users, devices and formats. The new way of learning will depend on how successful the conversion is from iPadisation to iPedagogy through bringing your own devices (BYOD) to the party. Technology is finally catching up with Weiser’s (1993) [1] vision of a third wave of many to one relationship between computer and human immersion in the learning process through ubiquitous learning

Do we need a new theory of drawing? : exploration on technological change between physical and digital visualisation

This article proposes a framework for current use and future potential for drawing to present, represent, simulate and visualise the world within the education, industry, practice and research landscapes. Today’s metamodernism allows to reimagine this paper’s focus as an act of drawing, rejecting and redrawing together modernism and post-modernism to visualise solutions for complex matters of concern. Modernist technology, built on Monge’s orthographic projection, initiated computer-aided design and made possible to specify matters of fact and function that lacked ornament digitally. While postmodernists deconstructed modernity with the irony of acrobatic aesthetics and technology based on a renewed approach of “art for art’s sake”. Fittingly, current incremental innovations are bringing about new forms of connection, informed knowledge, involvement, narratives and storytelling that can help the reinterpretation and agency of drawing for this day and age. Particularly, these developments query whether a designer’s first-person observer-independent world view is enough to elicit ideation, conceptualisation and design. New product development teams are gradually becoming distributed globally and work in their own simulated virtual world environments. Their drawings structure simulations that can be tested digitally to save on material development and production, can be prototyped easily as material artefacts because new types of manufacturing, and increasingly, are becoming the end goal of design activity. Drawing principles are changing their application from the corner of two-dimensional emersion of individual ideas to the opposite of three-dimensional immersion into the design environment as embodied cognitive and enactivated experiences that express its participants’ interaction with real and simulated environments

Industrial design education in a post-industrial age : redefining learning from transmission to transformative and expansive learning

This article narrates on the process to redefine learning from transmission to transformative and expansive learning as part of implementation of a new constructionist industrial design curriculum launched on 2016. Interest is placed here on examples that demonstrate today essential need for crossing boundaries for design education and professional development. They dealt specially with bridging the physical and digital divide in a discipline that has been traditionally bound to its assembly and manufacturing industrial age roots and needs to find a new value for itself in this 21st century. Content shows preliminary work that belongs to a larger research to be published in the future. Redefinition counted greatly on expected designers’ “elastic mind” that would allow participants (lecturers and students) to adapt quickly. The program presented a cultural and epistemological change from learning by skill transmission to learning by social and experiential transformation and expansion. It followed up on Bauhaus, HfG Ulm and Malmo Schools of Design legacy as it moved further than Dewey’s learning-by-doing to Papert’s constructionism, and more recent manifestations of the open school movement. Particularly it aligns with critical pedagogy, critical design and critical making, and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and design, and mathematics) principles supporting participants to implement CDIO (conceiving, designing, implementing and operating) framework. This approach validated design by probing and proving practically how it is implemented and operates rather than considering it as done at concept proposal stage