Dena Al-Thani

Inam Qadir, Elizabeth B Varghese, Dena Al-Thani et al.

Accurate Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) screening for school-age children is crucial to identify cases that may have been missed earlier and to enable timely interventions supporting social, cognitive, and academic development. Current ASD screening relies on subjective assessments and 2D analysis methods that fail to capture spatial displacement patterns characteristic of ASD behaviors. In this study, a novel 3D temporal analysis framework is presented, built on top of DECA (Detailed Expression Capture and Animation), a 3D modeling framework, to extract comprehensive head pose parameters (including translational components $T_x, T_y, T_z$) and facial expressions independent of pose variations. LSTM and GRU-based temporal classifiers were trained on the extracted 3D features from video data collected from 39 participants (19 ASD, 20 TD) aged 7-12 years during Virtual Reality-Continuous Performance Test tasks. The GRU-based models demonstrated superior performance, with 3D head pose features achieving 83.9\% accuracy and 3D facial features reaching 81.4\% accuracy, outperforming 2D baseline approaches by 10.7\% and 7.5\%, respectively. Furthermore, multimodal fusion of 3D head pose and facial features with PCA-based dimensionality reduction achieved the highest accuracy of 84.6\%, outperforming unimodal approaches. This work establishes a foundation for objective, automated screening tools addressing current diagnostic limitations in ASD identification for school-age populations.

Aboubakr Aqle, Kamran Khowaja, Dena Al-Thani

This work designs, evaluates, and improves a proposed search engine interface for Visually Impaired VI users to efficiently perform web search activities. Our conceptual modeling technique is based on Formal Concept Analysis FCA that is used for data analysis. This approach highlights the hierarchized approach to represent the discovered concepts. It is combined with context interactive navigation in an interface which is called interactive search engine (InteractSE). This interface aims to reduce the time and effort required by the VI users to browse search results. InteractSE was evaluated by experts using Nielsen heuristics and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0 for its usability and accessibility. The analysis was carried out based on the usability problems identified and their average severity ratings. The results show that the most frequently violated heuristics from Nielsen set are consistency, documentation, and the average severity rating of all the problems is minor. The results also show that the most frequently violated WCAG 2 guidelines are distinguishable, followed by navigable and affordance. The average severity rating of all the problems found using WCAG 2 guidelines is also minor. The results show that Nielsen heuristics and WCAG 2.0 guidelines contributed to identifying several usability problems, which might have missed out if either of them was used alone.

Aboubakr Aqle, Dena Al-Thani, Ali Jaoua

Online news media provides aggregated news and stories from different sources all over the world and up-to-date news coverage. The main goal of this study is to have a solution that considered as a homogeneous source for the news and to represent the news in a new conceptual framework. Furthermore, the user can easily find different updated news in a fast way through the designed interface. The Mobile App implementation is based on modeling the multi-level conceptual analysis discipline. Discovering main concepts of any domain is captured from the hidden unstructured data that are analyzed by the proposed solution. Concepts are discovered through analyzing data patterns to be structured into a tree-based interface for easy navigation for the end user, through the discovered news concepts. Our final experiment results showing that analyzing the news before displaying to the end-user and restructuring the final output in a conceptual multilevel structure, that producing new display frame for the end user to find the related information to his interest.