Khaled Alanezi

Khaled Alanezi, Nuha Albadi, Omar Hammad et al.

Online reviews have become essential for users to make informed decisions in everyday tasks ranging from planning summer vacations to purchasing groceries and making financial investments. A key problem in using online reviews is the overabundance of online that overwhelms the users. As a result, recommendation systems for providing helpfulness of reviews are being developed. This paper argues that cultural background is an important feature that impacts the nature of a review written by the user, and must be considered as a feature in assessing the helpfulness of online reviews. The paper provides an in-depth study of differences in online reviews written by users from different cultural backgrounds and how incorporating culture as a feature can lead to better review helpfulness recommendations. In particular, we analyze online reviews originating from two distinct cultural spheres, namely Arabic and Western cultures, for two different products, hotels and books. Our analysis demonstrates that the nature of reviews written by users differs based on their cultural backgrounds and that this difference varies based on the specific product being reviewed. Finally, we have developed six different review helpfulness recommendation models that demonstrate that taking culture into account leads to better recommendations.

Khaled Alanezi, Shivakant Mishra

This paper presents a new privacy negotiation mechanism for an IoT environment that is both efficient and practical to cope with the IoT special need of seamlessness. This mechanism allows IoT users to express and enforce their personal privacy preferences in a seamless manner while interacting with IoT deployments. A key contribution of the paper is that it addresses the privacy concerns of individual users as well as a group of users where privacy preferences of all individual users are combined into a group privacy profile to be negotiated with the IoT owner. In addition, the proposed mechanism satisfies the privacy requirements of the IoT deployment owner. Finally, the proposed privacy mechanism is agnostic to the actual IoT architecture and can be used over a user-managed, edge-managed or a cloud-managed IoT architecture. Prototypes of the proposed mechanism have been implemented for each of these three architectures, and the results show the capability of the protocol to negotiate privacy while adding insignificant time overhead.

Shuo Zhang, Khaled Alanezi, Mike Gartrell et al.

The wide adoption of smartphones and mobile applications has brought significant changes to not only how individuals behave in the real world, but also how groups of users interact with each other when organizing group events. Understanding how users make event decisions as a group and identifying the contributing factors can offer important insights for social group studies and more effective system and application design for group event scheduling. In this work, we have designed a new mobile application called OutWithFriendz, which enables users of our mobile app to organize group events, invite friends, suggest and vote on event time and venue. We have deployed OutWithFriendz at both Apple App Store and Google Play, and conducted a large-scale user study spanning over 500 users and 300 group events. Our analysis has revealed several important observations regarding group event planning process including the importance of user mobility, individual preferences, host preferences, and group voting process.