Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2013 Issue 1

Using the effective field theory (EFT) and mean field theory (MFT), we investigate the magnetic properties of the nanojunction system...Co][Co_(1-c)Gd_c]_l ][Co]_l [Co_(1-c)Gd_c ]_l [Co... between Co leads. The amorphous ][Co_(1-c)Gd_c]_l ] composite nanomaterial is modeled as a homogeneous random alloy of concentrations "c" on an hcp crystal lattice, and "l" is the number of its corresponding hcp (0001) atomic planes. In particular, EFT determines the appropriate exchange constants for Co and Gd by computing their single-atom spin correlations and magnetizations, in good agreement with experimental data in the ordered phase. The EFT results for the Co magnetization in the leads serve to seed the MFT calculations for the nanojunction from the interfaces inward. This combined analysis yields the sublattice magnetizations for Co and Gd sites, and compensation effects, on the individual nanojunction atomic planes, as a function of the alloy concentration, temperature and nanojunction thicknesses. We observe that the magnetic variables are different for the first few atomic planes near the nanojunction interfaces, but tend to limiting solutions in the core planes. The EFT and MFT calculated exchange constants and sublattice magnetizations are necessary elements for the computation of the spin dynamics for this nanojunction system, using a quasi-classical treatment over the spin precession amplitudes at temperatures distant from the critical temperatures of $Co_{1-c}Gd_c$ alloy. The full analysis in the virtual crystal approximation (VCA) over the magnetic ground state of the system yields both the spin waves (SWs) localized on the nanojunction, and also the ballistic scattering and transport across the nanojunction for SWs incident from the leads by applying the phase field matching theory (PFMT). The model results demonstrate the possibility of resonance assisted maxima for the SW transmission spectra owing to interactions between the incident SWs and the localized spin resonances on the nanojunction. The spectral transmission results for low frequency spin waves are of specific interest for experimentalist, because these lower frequency SWs correspond to submicroscopic wavelengths which are of present interest in experimental magnonics research and the VCA is increasingly valid as a model approximation for such frequencies. Fig.1: Calculated spin variables sigma_Co and sigma_Gd, in the first layer of [Co_(1-c}Gd_(c)]_2[Co]_2[Co_(1-c}Gd_(c)]_2 layer nanojunction as a function of kT in meV. Fig.2: The total reflection R and transmission T cross sections associated with the scattering at the nanojunction for the cobalt leads SW modes 1, 2, with the selected choices of incident angle (phi_z, phi_y). Acknowledgements: The authors acknowledge QNRF financial support for the NPRP 4-184-1-035 project.

In modern enterprise and Internet-based application environments, a separate middlebox infrastructure for providing application delivery services such as security (e.g., firewalls, intrusion detection), performance (e.g., SSL off loaders), and scaling (e.g., load balancers) is deployed. However, there is no explicit support for middleboxes in the original Internet design; forcing datacenter administrators to accommodate middleboxes through ad-hoc and error-prone network configuration techniques. Given their importance and yet the ad-hoc nature of their deployment, we plan to study application delivery (in general) in the context of cloud-based application deployment environments. To fully leverage these opportunities, ASPs need to deploy a globally distributed application-level routing infrastructure to intelligently route application traffic to the right instance. But, since such an infrastructure would be extremely hard to own and mange, it is best to design a shared solution where application-level routing could be provided as a service by a third party provider having a globally distributed presence, such as an ISP. Although these requirements seem separate, they can be converged into a single abstraction for supporting application delivery in the cloud context.

Smart cities could be defined as developed urban areas, creating sustainable economic development and high quality of life by excelling in multiple key areas such as transportation, environment, economy, living, and government. This excellence could be reached through efficiency based on the intelligent management and integrated Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Motivations. In the near future (2030), two thirds of the world population will reside on a city, thus increasing drastically demands on city infrastructures. As a result, urbanization is becoming a crucial issue. The Internet of Things (IoT) vision foresees billions of devices to form a worldwide network of interconnected objects including computers, mobile phones, RFID tags and wireless sensors. In this study, we focus on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The WSNs are a specific technology suitable to create Smart Cities. A distributed network of intelligent sensor nodes could measure numerous parameters and communicate them wirelessly and in real-time and makes possible a more efficient management of the city. For example, the pollution concentration in each street can be monitored, water leaks can be detected or noise maps of the city obtained. The number of applications with WSNs available for smart cities is only bounded by imagination: environmental care, sustainable development, healthcare, efficient traffic management, energy supply, water management, green buildings, etc. In short, WSN could improve the quality of life in a city. Scope. However, such urban applications often use multi-hop wireless networks with high density to obtain sufficient area coverage. As a result, they need networking stacks and routing protocols that can scale with network size and density, while remaining energy-efficient and lightweight. To this end, the IETF RoLL working group has designed the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). This paper presents experimental results on the RPL protocol. The RPL properties in terms of delivery ratio, control packet overhead, dynamics and robustness are studied. The results are obtained by several experimentations conducted on two large WSNs testbeds composed of more than 100 sensor nodes each. In this real-life scenario (high density and convergecast traffic), several intrinsic characteristics of RPL are underlined: path length stability but reduced delivery ratio and important overhead (Fig. 1). However, the routing metrics, as defined by default, favor the creation of "hubs", aggregating most of 2-hops nodes (Fig. 2). To investigate the RPL robustness, we observe its behavior when facing a sudden death of several sensors and when several sensors are redeployed. RPL shows good abilities to maintain the routing process despite such events. However, the paper highlights that this ability can be reduced if only few critical nodes fail. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first study of RPL on such large platform.

Since I studied chemical education chemistry in a very unique way at Oklahoma State University, Oklahoma , United States Of America. teaching chemistry became a hobby not a job for me. which motivated me to apply the teaching with educational technology to every chemistry aspect that I teach as I applied my unique expertise through the smart digital flipped classroom technique in teaching the different chemistry laboratories, on the blackboard and in the different chemistry tutorial classes that I taught offered by the chemistry Department, college of arts and sciences , Qatar University. Through building An educational web site with the theme chemistry flipped for teaching chemistry. The blended learning chemistry web site provides students with explanatory material that is augmented by audio visual simulations with technology immersed education. The general idea that students work at their own pace, receiving lectures at home via online videos or podcasts which I record and post for them so they got prepared before coming to the class. the students are able to use class time to practice what they've learned with traditional schoolwork—but with my freed up for additional one-on-one time. Students can review lessons anytime, anywhere on their personal computers and smart phones, reserving class time for in-depth discussions or doing the actual experiment and most importantly they know and understand what they are doing. Through unlocking knowledge and empowering minds. The video lecture is often seen as the key ingredient in the flipped approach. My Talk will be on the use of educational technology in teaching chemistry as my chem Demos go behind the magic as I used new techniques for helping students visualize the concept which helped them understand the topic more. I converted the writing discussion into a conversation into the cloud system. The web site includes online interactive pre/post-classroom activities assessment pages, live podcast capture for the experiments done by the students, post-classroom activities, dynamic quizzes and practice exams pages, honor pages for recognizing the hard working students, in class lecture live podcasting, linked experiments and many more. Probabilistic system analysis is used for keeping track of the students' progress, their access and their learn and I used statistic to relate the students results before and after the use of my blended learning audiovisual simulation flipped classroom. During the study the students showed an extraordinary passion to chemistry , they study it on iTunes, YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter, they learned it very well, chemistry with them everywhere even I their free time. demonstrate the advantages associated with using web based learning with the flipped chemistry teaching methods provide support for students in a large lecture and laboratory classes. The two biggest changes resulting from the method are the manner in which content is delivered (outside of class) and the way students spend time in the classroom (putting principles into practice). Feedback from students has conveyed that the style is more dynamic and motivational than traditional, passive teaching. Which help keep open courseware going and growing.

We overview the Arabic Ontology, an ongoing project at Sina Institute, at Birzeit University, Palestine. The Arabic Ontology is a linguistic ontology that represents the meanings (i.e., concepts) of Arabic terms using formal semantic relationships, such as SubtypeOf and PartOf. In this way, the ontology becomes a tree (i.e., classification) of meanings of the Arabic terms. To build this ontology (see Fig.1), the set of all Arabic terms are collected; then for each term, the set of its concepts (polysemy) are identified using unique numbers and described using glosses. Terms referring to same meaning (called synsets) are given the same concept identifier. These concepts are then classified using Subsumption and Parenthood relationships. The Arabic Ontology follows the same design as WordNet (i.e., network of synsets), thus it can be used as an Arabic WordNet. However, unlike WordNet, the Arabic Ontology is logically and philosophically well-founded, following strict ontological principles. The Subsumption relation is a formal subset relation. The ontological correctness of a relation (e.g., whether "PeriodicTable SubtypeOf Table" is true in reality) in WordNet is based on whether native speakers accept such a claim. However, the ontological correctness of the Arabic Ontology is based on what scientists accept; but if it can't be determined by science, then what philosophers accept; and if philosophy doesn't have an answer then we refer to what linguistics accept. Our classification also follows the OntoClean methodology when dealing with, instances, concepts, types, roles, and parts. As described in the next section, the top levels of the Arabic Ontology are derived from philosophical notions, which further govern the ontological correctness of its lower levels. Moreover, glosses are formulated using strict ontological rules focusing on intrinsic properties. Figure 1. Illustration of terms' concepts and its conceptual relations Why the Arabic Ontology It can be used in many application scenarios such as: (1) information search and retrieval, to enrich queries and improve the results' quality, i.e., meaningful search rather than string-matching search; (2) Machine translation and term disambiguation, by finding the exact mapping of concepts across languages, as the Arabic Ontology is also mapped to the English WordNet; (3) Data Integration and interoperability in which the Arabic Ontology can be used as a semantic reference to several autonomous information systems; (4) Semantic web and web 3.0, by using the Arabic Ontology as a semantic reference to disambiguate meanings used in web sites; (5) Conceptual dictionary, allowing people to easily browse and find meanings and the differences between meanings. The Arabic Ontology Top Levels Figure 2 presents the top levels of the Arabic Ontology, which is a classification of the most abstract concepts (i.e., meanings) of the Arabic terms. Only three levels are presented below for the sake of brevity. All concepts in the Arabic Ontology are classified under these top-levels. We designed these concepts after a deep investigation of the philosophy literature and based on well-recognized upper level ontologies like BFO, DOLCE, SUMO, and KYOTO. Figure 2. The Top three levels of the Arabic Ontology (Alpha Version)

Increasing attention has recently been drawn in the human-computer interaction community towards the design and development of accessible computer applications for children and youth with developmental or cognitive impairments. Due to better healthcare and assistive technology, the quality of life for children with intellectual disability (ID) has evidently been improved. Many children with ID often have cognitive disabilities, along with overweight problems due to lack of physical activity. This paper introduces an edutainment system specifically designed to help these children have an enhanced and enjoyable learning process, and addresses the need for integrating physical activity into their daily lives. These games are developed with the following pedagogical model in mind: A combination of Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning with a mild implementation of Skinner's Operant Condition, incorporated with physical activity as part of the learning process. The system proposed consists of a padded floor mat that consists of sixteen square tiles supported by sensors, which are used to interact with a number of software games specifically designed to suit the mental needs of children with ID. The games consist of multimedia technology with a tangible user interface. The edutainment system consists of three games, each with three difficulty levels meant to suit specific needs of different children. The system aims at enhancing the learning, coordination and memorization skills of the children with ID while involving them into physical activities, thus offering both mental and physical benefits. The edutainment system was tested on 100 children with different IDs, half of which have Down syndrome (DS. The children pertain to three disability levels; mildly, moderately and severely disabled. The obtained results depict a high increase in the learning process as the children became more proactive in the classrooms. Assessment methodology took into account the following constraints; disability type, disability level, gender, scoring, timing, motivation, coordination, acceptance levels and relative performance. The following groups, when compared with other groups, achieved best results in terms of scores and coordination: children with DS, mildly disabled children and females. In contrast to children with other IDs, moderately and severely disabled children, and males performed with lower scores and coordination levels, but all the above mentioned groups exhibited high motivation levels. Rejection rate was found to be very low, at 3% of children refusing to participate. When children repeated the games, 92% were noted to achieve significantly higher results. The edutainment is developed with the following aims: helping children with ID have an enhanced cognitive experience, allowing them a learning environment where they can interact with the game and exert physical activities, ensuring a proactive role for all in the classroom, boosting motivation, coordination and memory levels. Results proved that the system had very positive effects on the children, in terms of cognition and motivational levels. Instructors also expressed willingness to incorporate the edutainment system into the classroom on a daily basis, as a complementary tool to conventional learning.

With the decline in physical activities among young people, it is essential to monitor their physical activity and ensure their calorie expenditure is within the range necessary to lead a healthy life style. For many children and young adults, video gaming is one favorable venue for physical activities. A new flavor of video games on popular platforms, such as Wii and Xbox, aim to improve the health of young adults through competing in games which require players to perform various physical activities. These popular platforms detect the user movements, and through an avatar in the game, players can be part of the game activities, such as boxing, playing tennis, dancing, avoiding obstacles, etc. Early studies used self-administered questionnaires or interviews to collect data about the patient's activities. These self-reporting methods ask participants to report their activities on hourly, daily, or weekly basis. But self-reporting techniques suffer from a number of limitations, such as inconvenience in entering data, poor compliance, and inaccuracy due to bias or poor memory. Reporting activities is a sensitive task for overweight/obese individuals with research evidence showing that they tend overestimate the calories they burn. Having a tool to help estimate calories consumption is therefore becoming essential to manage obesity and over-weight issues. We propose providing a calories expenditure estimation service. This service would augment the treatment provided by an obesity clinic or a personal trainer for obese children. Our energy expenditure estimation system consists of two main components: activity recognition and calories estimation. Activity recognition systems have three main components: low-level sensing module to gather sensor data, feature selection module to process raw sensor data and select the features necessary to recognize activities, and a classification module to infer the activity from the captured features. Using the activity type, we can estimate the calories consumption using existing models on energy expenditure developed on the gold standard of respiratory gases measurements. We choose Kinetic as our test platform. The natural user interface in Kinect is the low-level sensing module providing skeleton tracking data. The skeleton positions will be the raw input to our activity recognition module. From this raw data, we define the features that help the classifier, such as the speed of the hands and legs, body orientation, and rate of change in the vertical and horizontal position. These are some features that can be quantified and passed periodically (e.g., every 5 seconds) to the classifier to distinguish between different activities. Other important features might need more processing, such as the standard deviation, the difference between peaks (in periodic activities), and the distribution of skeleton positions. We also plan to build an index for the calories expenditure for game activities using the medical gold standard of oxygen consumption, CO2. Game activities, such as playing tennis, running, and boxing are different from the same real world activities in terms of enegy concumption and it would be useful to quantify the difference in order to answer the question of whether these “health” games are useful for weight loss.

We describe an assistive technology for improved literacy among the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, that is cost-wise and accessible to deaf individuals and their families/service providers (e.g., educators), businesses which employ them or list them as customers and healthcare professionals. The technology functions as (1) A real-time translation system between Moroccan Sign Language (a visual-gestural language) and standard written Arabic. Moroccan Sign Language (MSL) is a visual/gestural language that is distinct from spoken Moroccan Arabic and Modern Standrad Arabic (SA) and has no text representation. In this context, we describe some challenges in SA-to-MSL machine translation. In Arabic, word structure is not built linearly as is the case in concatenative morphological systems, which results in a large space of of morphological variation. The language has a large degree of ambiguity in word senses, and further ambiguity attributable to a writing system that omits diacritics. (e.g. short vowels, consonant doubling, inflection marks). The lack of diacritics coupled with word order flexibility are causes of ambiguity in the syntactic structure of Arabic. The problem is compounded when translating into a visual/gestural language that has far fewer signs than words of the source language. In this presentation, we show how Natural language processing tools are integrated into the system, the architecture of the system and provide a demo of several input examples with different levels of complexity. Our Moroccan Sign Language database has currently 2000 Graphic signs and their corresponding video clips. The database extension is an ongoing process task that is done in collaboration with MSL interpreters, deaf signers and educators in Deaf schools in different regions in Morocco. (2) Instructional tool: Deaf school children, in general, have poor reading skills. It is easier for them to understand text represented in sign language than in print. Several works have demonstrated that a combination of sign language and spoken/written language can significantly improve literacy and comprehension (Singleton, Supalla, Litchfield, & Schley, 1998; Prinz, Kuntz, & Strong, 1997; Ramsey & Padden, 1998). While many assistive technologies have been created for the blind, such as hand-held scanners and screen readers, there are only a few products targeting poor readers who are deaf. An example of such technology is the iCommunicator™ which translates in real time: speech to text, speech/typed text to videos of signs, and speech/typed text to computer generated voice. This tool, however, does not generate text from scans and display them with sign graphic supports that a teacher can print, edit, and use to support reading. It also does not capture screen text. We show a set of tools aiming at improving literacy among the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing. Our tools offer a variety of input and ouput options, including scanning, screen text transfer, sign graphics and video clips. The technology we have developed is useful to teachers, educators, Health care professionals, speech/language pathologists, etc. who have a need to support understanding of Arabic text with Moroccan Sign Language signs for purposes of literacy improvement, curriculum enhancement, or communication in emergency situations.

The study of complex multi-faceted scientific questions demand innovative computing solutions—solutions that transcend beyond the management of big data to dedicated semantics-enabled, services-driven infrastructures that can effectively aggregate, filter, process, analyze, visualize and share the cumulative scientific efforts and insights of the research community. From a technical standpoint, E-Science purports technology-enabled collaborative research platforms to (i) collect, store and share multi-modal data collected from different geographic sites, (ii) perform complex simulations and experiments using sophisticated simulation models; (iii) design complex experiments by integrating data and models and executing them as per the experiment workflow; (iv) visualize high-dimensional simulation results; and (v) aggregate and share the scientific results (Fig 1). Taking a knowledge management approach, we have developed an innovative E-Science platform— termed Platform for Ocean Knowledge Management (POKM)—that is built using innovative web-enabled services, services-oriented architecture, semantic web, workflow management and data visualization technologies. POKM offers a suite of E-Science services that allow oceanographic researchers to (a) handle large volumes of ocean and marine life data; (b) access, share, integrate and operationalize the data and simulation models; (c) visualization of data and simulation results; (d) multi-site collaborations in joint scientific research experiments; and (e) form a broad, virtual community of national and international researchers, marine resource managers, policy makers and climate change specialists. (Fig 2) The functional objective of our E-Science infrastructure is to establish an online scientific experimentation platform that supports an assortment of data/knowledge access and processing tools to allow a group of scientists to collaborate and conduct complex experiments by sharing data, models, knowledge, computing resources and expertise. Our E-Science approach is to complement data-driven approaches with domain-specific knowledge-centric models in order to establish causal, associative and taxonomic relations between (a) raw data and modeled observations; (b) observations and their causes; and (c) causes and theoretical models. This is achieved by taking a unique knowledge management approach, whereby we have exploited semantic web technologies to semantically describe the data, scientific models, knowledge artifacts and web services. The use of semantic web technologies provides a mechanism for the selection and integration of problem-specific data from large repositories. To define the functional aspects of the e-science services we have developed a services ontology that provides a semantic description of knowledge-centric e-science services. POKM is modeled along a services-oriented architecture that exposes a range of task-specific web services accessible through a web portal. The POKM architecture features five layers—Presentation Layer, Collaboration Layer, Service Composition Layer, Service Layer and Ontology Layer (Fig 3). POKM is applied to the domain of oceanography to understand our changing eco-system and its impact on marine life. POKM helps researchers investigate (a) changes in marine animal movement on time scales of days to decades; (b) coastal flooding due to changes in certain ocean parameters; (c) density of fish colonies and stocks; and (d) time-varying physical characteristics of the oceans (Fig 4 & 5). In this paper, we present the technical architecture and functional description of POKM, highlighting the various technical innovations and their applications to E-Science.