Lama Hamandi | American University of Beirut (original) (raw)
Papers by Lama Hamandi
International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy (iJEP)
A capstone project is a culminating experience that entails creativity, critical thinking, and ad... more A capstone project is a culminating experience that entails creativity, critical thinking, and advanced problem-solving skills. To that end, capstone projects enable students to prove their abilities, demonstrate their attained skills, and carry out a significant project in their field. In Computer Science Bachelor programs, there is a strong mapping between learning outcomes of capstone projects and all student learning outcomes. This paper presents an assessment framework for capstone courses that allows for sound evaluations of the performance of students and project qualities; besides assessing the student outcomes of the program. The developed framework comprises criteria, indicators, extensive analytic rubrics, and a summative statistical formulation. The presented course and framework are supported by the results, analysis, and evaluation of a pilot study for a single institution to explore the effectiveness of the proposed tool.
Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing
Proceedings of CIBITIC, 2006
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has gained a lot of importance nowadays with many applications ... more Natural Language Processing (NLP) has gained a lot of importance nowadays with many applications requiring real-time performance. In order to achieve the real-time requirements, the components of a NLP system should be made more efficient. An ...
IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, 1995
2009 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT), 2009
... [3] http://www.dialdirections.com/faq#one 33 Page 5. [4] http://www.nyc.gov/taxi ... 8, NO. 3... more ... [3] http://www.dialdirections.com/faq#one 33 Page 5. [4] http://www.nyc.gov/taxi ... 8, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2007, pp. 491-510. [16] Vishwas Raj Jain, Ravi Bagree, Aman Kumar, Prabhat Ranjan, "wildCENSE: GPS based Animal Tracking System," ISSNIP 2008. 34
2015 5th International Conference on Information & Communication Technology and Accessibility (ICTA), 2015
2015 5th International Conference on Information & Communication Technology and Accessibility (ICTA), 2015
Web page evaluation systems are needed to evaluate the accessibility of websites. Such evaluation... more Web page evaluation systems are needed to evaluate the accessibility of websites. Such evaluation is important so that website administrators can change their websites so people with disabilities would be able to use them. Currently, such systems produce varying results that are not always useful for website administrators. Moreover it is difficult to ascertain for sure to what degree the web pages conform to accessibility guidelines. In this paper, the current state of open-source web accessibility evaluation tools is reviewed. As a result, AChecker, a system that evaluates web page compliance with WCAG 2.0, is identified as the best available. Three types of deficiencies in AChecker are identified, unclear comments, redundancy of errors reporting and lack of automatic or semiautomatic repair. An interactive evaluation tool (IWAET) is developed based on AChecker. The usability of the new system is studied. The study involved a group of web developers with different levels of programming experience and no accessibility knowledge. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted in usability evaluation. The developed system is compared to AChecker. The results of the evaluation are presented which show clearly the superiority of the new system compared to the currently available systems.
One way to rank universities nowadays is through running Webometrics on a university's website. W... more One way to rank universities nowadays is through running Webometrics on a university's
website. Webometrics measure the overall web presence of websites using various indicators. One
way of improving the ranking of a university is to keep measuring its web presence and taking
corrective actions based on an analysis of the results. In this paper, an analytical study of twentyfour
university websites in Lebanon is conducted. Ranking the universities web sites based on two
webometric ranking methods (Web Impact Factor (WIF) and Web Indicators of Science, Innovation
and Research (WISER)) is presented. WIF and WISER are based on different webometric
indicators such as visibility (external links), size (webpages), rich files and scholar (academic
papers). The study was conducted over three years 2011, 2012 and 2013 using several search
engines. Based on the collected data and its analysis, an automated ranking and recommendation
system was designed and implemented. The main goal of this system was to reduce the time needed
for each university webmaster to rank the website. Another goal was to generate automated
recommendations to help a university improve its rank and fix problems that it faces in its
website. In the paper, it is shown that that the correlation between WIF and WISER is negative and
it is recommended not to use WIF because of its limitations; whereas WISER is more flexible and
promotes research and publications.
ieeexplore.ieee.org
ABSTRACT Social networks contain large amounts of posts of different data types (text, images, so... more ABSTRACT Social networks contain large amounts of posts of different data types (text, images, sounds and videos). Textual posts express authors' opinions (with or against) or feeling (love, hate, optimism, pessimism, or anger). Such opinions are important for commercial and governmental organization since they help checking public opinion about a product, policy or an object in general. In this paper we present the application of two different approaches to classify Arabic Facebook posts. The first one depends on syntactic features, using common patterns used in different Arabic dialects to express opinions. These patterns achieved high accuracy in determining the polarity of a sentiment even when tested against new corpus. This approach acts on informal Arabic text, which has not been addressed before. Different setups were tried and the highest coverage and accuracy achieved were 49.5% and 83.4 % respectively. The second approach is an ordinary probabilistic model, Naïve-Bayes classifier, that assumes the independence of features in determining the class the highest coverage achieved in this approach was 60.5% in the first setup and 91.2% when Naïve search was used as a binary classifier to classify the posts as objective or subjective.
2012 2nd International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2012
ABSTRACT Automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs is an important tool in intelligent... more ABSTRACT Automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs is an important tool in intelligent vehicles. It allows more autonomous vehicles and it can alert the driver to possible hazards and changes in the road. In this paper we focus on the recognition of a wide set of triangular traffic signs using a novel algorithm, the Number of Peaks. Once a traffic sign is detected, three horizontal lines (T, H, B) and three vertical lines (R, V, L) across the image are used to recognize the sign. The number of crossings from a black pixel to a white pixel (peak) on each line is calculated. A simple and fast decision-tree-like search algorithm uses the number of peaks to differentiate between the triangular road signs. A 100% correct detection rate is achievable even in a fairly noisy environment.
2009 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT), 2009
Automatic recognition of printed and handwritten documents remains an active area of research. Ar... more Automatic recognition of printed and handwritten documents remains an active area of research. Arabic is one of the languages that present special problems. Arabic is cursive and therefore necessitates a segmentation process to determine the boundaries of a ...
In this paper, the “character recognition” approach to recognizing a vehicle license plate is use... more In this paper, the “character recognition” approach to recognizing a vehicle license plate is used for localizing Saudi license plates. The proposed algorithm filters out all possible objects from the license plate image and focuses on the resulting objects. The coordinates of the center point of the bounding box for these objects is calculated and then possible alignments between these objects are checked. After finding the aligned objects, the recognition algorithms are applied to differentiate the numbers from the letters in the plate.
2012 2nd International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2012
ABSTRACT Social networks contain large amounts of posts of different data types (text, images, so... more ABSTRACT Social networks contain large amounts of posts of different data types (text, images, sounds and videos). Textual posts express authors' opinions (with or against) or feeling (love, hate, optimism, pessimism, or anger). Such opinions are important for commercial and governmental organization since they help checking public opinion about a product, policy or an object in general. In this paper we present the application of two different approaches to classify Arabic Facebook posts. The first one depends on syntactic features, using common patterns used in different Arabic dialects to express opinions. These patterns achieved high accuracy in determining the polarity of a sentiment even when tested against new corpus. This approach acts on informal Arabic text, which has not been addressed before. Different setups were tried and the highest coverage and accuracy achieved were 49.5% and 83.4 % respectively. The second approach is an ordinary probabilistic model, Naïve-Bayes classifier, that assumes the independence of features in determining the class the highest coverage achieved in this approach was 60.5% in the first setup and 91.2% when Naïve search was used as a binary classifier to classify the posts as objective or subjective.
2009 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT), 2009
Automatic recognition of printed and handwritten documents remains an active area of research. Ar... more Automatic recognition of printed and handwritten documents remains an active area of research. Arabic is one of the languages that present special problems. Arabic is cursive and therefore necessitates a segmentation process to determine the boundaries of a ...
Applications in Business, Engineering, and Medicine, 2012
2012 2nd International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2012
ABSTRACT Automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs is an important tool in intelligent... more ABSTRACT Automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs is an important tool in intelligent vehicles. It allows more autonomous vehicles and it can alert the driver to possible hazards and changes in the road. In this paper we focus on the recognition of a wide set of triangular traffic signs using a novel algorithm, the Number of Peaks. Once a traffic sign is detected, three horizontal lines (T, H, B) and three vertical lines (R, V, L) across the image are used to recognize the sign. The number of crossings from a black pixel to a white pixel (peak) on each line is calculated. A simple and fast decision-tree-like search algorithm uses the number of peaks to differentiate between the triangular road signs. A 100% correct detection rate is achievable even in a fairly noisy environment.
2009 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT), 2009
... [3] http://www.dialdirections.com/faq#one 33 Page 5. [4] http://www.nyc.gov/taxi ... 8, NO. 3... more ... [3] http://www.dialdirections.com/faq#one 33 Page 5. [4] http://www.nyc.gov/taxi ... 8, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2007, pp. 491-510. [16] Vishwas Raj Jain, Ravi Bagree, Aman Kumar, Prabhat Ranjan, "wildCENSE: GPS based Animal Tracking System," ISSNIP 2008. 34
International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy (iJEP)
A capstone project is a culminating experience that entails creativity, critical thinking, and ad... more A capstone project is a culminating experience that entails creativity, critical thinking, and advanced problem-solving skills. To that end, capstone projects enable students to prove their abilities, demonstrate their attained skills, and carry out a significant project in their field. In Computer Science Bachelor programs, there is a strong mapping between learning outcomes of capstone projects and all student learning outcomes. This paper presents an assessment framework for capstone courses that allows for sound evaluations of the performance of students and project qualities; besides assessing the student outcomes of the program. The developed framework comprises criteria, indicators, extensive analytic rubrics, and a summative statistical formulation. The presented course and framework are supported by the results, analysis, and evaluation of a pilot study for a single institution to explore the effectiveness of the proposed tool.
Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing
Proceedings of CIBITIC, 2006
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has gained a lot of importance nowadays with many applications ... more Natural Language Processing (NLP) has gained a lot of importance nowadays with many applications requiring real-time performance. In order to achieve the real-time requirements, the components of a NLP system should be made more efficient. An ...
IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, 1995
2009 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT), 2009
... [3] http://www.dialdirections.com/faq#one 33 Page 5. [4] http://www.nyc.gov/taxi ... 8, NO. 3... more ... [3] http://www.dialdirections.com/faq#one 33 Page 5. [4] http://www.nyc.gov/taxi ... 8, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2007, pp. 491-510. [16] Vishwas Raj Jain, Ravi Bagree, Aman Kumar, Prabhat Ranjan, "wildCENSE: GPS based Animal Tracking System," ISSNIP 2008. 34
2015 5th International Conference on Information & Communication Technology and Accessibility (ICTA), 2015
2015 5th International Conference on Information & Communication Technology and Accessibility (ICTA), 2015
Web page evaluation systems are needed to evaluate the accessibility of websites. Such evaluation... more Web page evaluation systems are needed to evaluate the accessibility of websites. Such evaluation is important so that website administrators can change their websites so people with disabilities would be able to use them. Currently, such systems produce varying results that are not always useful for website administrators. Moreover it is difficult to ascertain for sure to what degree the web pages conform to accessibility guidelines. In this paper, the current state of open-source web accessibility evaluation tools is reviewed. As a result, AChecker, a system that evaluates web page compliance with WCAG 2.0, is identified as the best available. Three types of deficiencies in AChecker are identified, unclear comments, redundancy of errors reporting and lack of automatic or semiautomatic repair. An interactive evaluation tool (IWAET) is developed based on AChecker. The usability of the new system is studied. The study involved a group of web developers with different levels of programming experience and no accessibility knowledge. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted in usability evaluation. The developed system is compared to AChecker. The results of the evaluation are presented which show clearly the superiority of the new system compared to the currently available systems.
One way to rank universities nowadays is through running Webometrics on a university's website. W... more One way to rank universities nowadays is through running Webometrics on a university's
website. Webometrics measure the overall web presence of websites using various indicators. One
way of improving the ranking of a university is to keep measuring its web presence and taking
corrective actions based on an analysis of the results. In this paper, an analytical study of twentyfour
university websites in Lebanon is conducted. Ranking the universities web sites based on two
webometric ranking methods (Web Impact Factor (WIF) and Web Indicators of Science, Innovation
and Research (WISER)) is presented. WIF and WISER are based on different webometric
indicators such as visibility (external links), size (webpages), rich files and scholar (academic
papers). The study was conducted over three years 2011, 2012 and 2013 using several search
engines. Based on the collected data and its analysis, an automated ranking and recommendation
system was designed and implemented. The main goal of this system was to reduce the time needed
for each university webmaster to rank the website. Another goal was to generate automated
recommendations to help a university improve its rank and fix problems that it faces in its
website. In the paper, it is shown that that the correlation between WIF and WISER is negative and
it is recommended not to use WIF because of its limitations; whereas WISER is more flexible and
promotes research and publications.
ieeexplore.ieee.org
ABSTRACT Social networks contain large amounts of posts of different data types (text, images, so... more ABSTRACT Social networks contain large amounts of posts of different data types (text, images, sounds and videos). Textual posts express authors' opinions (with or against) or feeling (love, hate, optimism, pessimism, or anger). Such opinions are important for commercial and governmental organization since they help checking public opinion about a product, policy or an object in general. In this paper we present the application of two different approaches to classify Arabic Facebook posts. The first one depends on syntactic features, using common patterns used in different Arabic dialects to express opinions. These patterns achieved high accuracy in determining the polarity of a sentiment even when tested against new corpus. This approach acts on informal Arabic text, which has not been addressed before. Different setups were tried and the highest coverage and accuracy achieved were 49.5% and 83.4 % respectively. The second approach is an ordinary probabilistic model, Naïve-Bayes classifier, that assumes the independence of features in determining the class the highest coverage achieved in this approach was 60.5% in the first setup and 91.2% when Naïve search was used as a binary classifier to classify the posts as objective or subjective.
2012 2nd International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2012
ABSTRACT Automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs is an important tool in intelligent... more ABSTRACT Automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs is an important tool in intelligent vehicles. It allows more autonomous vehicles and it can alert the driver to possible hazards and changes in the road. In this paper we focus on the recognition of a wide set of triangular traffic signs using a novel algorithm, the Number of Peaks. Once a traffic sign is detected, three horizontal lines (T, H, B) and three vertical lines (R, V, L) across the image are used to recognize the sign. The number of crossings from a black pixel to a white pixel (peak) on each line is calculated. A simple and fast decision-tree-like search algorithm uses the number of peaks to differentiate between the triangular road signs. A 100% correct detection rate is achievable even in a fairly noisy environment.
2009 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT), 2009
Automatic recognition of printed and handwritten documents remains an active area of research. Ar... more Automatic recognition of printed and handwritten documents remains an active area of research. Arabic is one of the languages that present special problems. Arabic is cursive and therefore necessitates a segmentation process to determine the boundaries of a ...
In this paper, the “character recognition” approach to recognizing a vehicle license plate is use... more In this paper, the “character recognition” approach to recognizing a vehicle license plate is used for localizing Saudi license plates. The proposed algorithm filters out all possible objects from the license plate image and focuses on the resulting objects. The coordinates of the center point of the bounding box for these objects is calculated and then possible alignments between these objects are checked. After finding the aligned objects, the recognition algorithms are applied to differentiate the numbers from the letters in the plate.
2012 2nd International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2012
ABSTRACT Social networks contain large amounts of posts of different data types (text, images, so... more ABSTRACT Social networks contain large amounts of posts of different data types (text, images, sounds and videos). Textual posts express authors' opinions (with or against) or feeling (love, hate, optimism, pessimism, or anger). Such opinions are important for commercial and governmental organization since they help checking public opinion about a product, policy or an object in general. In this paper we present the application of two different approaches to classify Arabic Facebook posts. The first one depends on syntactic features, using common patterns used in different Arabic dialects to express opinions. These patterns achieved high accuracy in determining the polarity of a sentiment even when tested against new corpus. This approach acts on informal Arabic text, which has not been addressed before. Different setups were tried and the highest coverage and accuracy achieved were 49.5% and 83.4 % respectively. The second approach is an ordinary probabilistic model, Naïve-Bayes classifier, that assumes the independence of features in determining the class the highest coverage achieved in this approach was 60.5% in the first setup and 91.2% when Naïve search was used as a binary classifier to classify the posts as objective or subjective.
2009 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT), 2009
Automatic recognition of printed and handwritten documents remains an active area of research. Ar... more Automatic recognition of printed and handwritten documents remains an active area of research. Arabic is one of the languages that present special problems. Arabic is cursive and therefore necessitates a segmentation process to determine the boundaries of a ...
Applications in Business, Engineering, and Medicine, 2012
2012 2nd International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2012
ABSTRACT Automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs is an important tool in intelligent... more ABSTRACT Automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs is an important tool in intelligent vehicles. It allows more autonomous vehicles and it can alert the driver to possible hazards and changes in the road. In this paper we focus on the recognition of a wide set of triangular traffic signs using a novel algorithm, the Number of Peaks. Once a traffic sign is detected, three horizontal lines (T, H, B) and three vertical lines (R, V, L) across the image are used to recognize the sign. The number of crossings from a black pixel to a white pixel (peak) on each line is calculated. A simple and fast decision-tree-like search algorithm uses the number of peaks to differentiate between the triangular road signs. A 100% correct detection rate is achievable even in a fairly noisy environment.
2009 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT), 2009
... [3] http://www.dialdirections.com/faq#one 33 Page 5. [4] http://www.nyc.gov/taxi ... 8, NO. 3... more ... [3] http://www.dialdirections.com/faq#one 33 Page 5. [4] http://www.nyc.gov/taxi ... 8, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2007, pp. 491-510. [16] Vishwas Raj Jain, Ravi Bagree, Aman Kumar, Prabhat Ranjan, "wildCENSE: GPS based Animal Tracking System," ISSNIP 2008. 34