Author Archives: Ahmed Alazri

by | April 29, 2015 · 4:02 pm

Technical demo: Empowering TrustPal with semantic technologies

This post will shed light on utilizing semantic technologies to improve the service provided by TrustPal. Beside its chatting and instance messaging feature, TrustPal meant to be a source of knowledge for different problems that face students. In other words, TrustPal will enable students to search for any similar problems faced by some other students in the past and get the solutions that were suggested as well as other knowledge related to that specific issue (e.g. the consequences of keeping the problem unsolved). So, TrustPal supposes to act as a knowledge base that able to provide similar past situations.

To smartly manage the knowledge stored in TrustPal -that is provided by students and other sources-, we developed a solution that use semantic web technologies. Below is a quick explanation of the issues that will be solved by implementing semantic web technologies:

  • Students’ issues are very likely to vary and distributed between different fields (e.g financial problem, depression, and homesick). In addition, each issue will not easily fit one or more of these fields, but will have many other dependences like depression facing student with health issues. Another example is where a student may have financial difficulties due to lacking of enough skills in managing personal finance. Such complicated situations need to be fetched smartly from the knowledge base to match student search.
  • Each students’ issue is not a standalone problem but having different roots and consequences. TrustPal users (i.e. students) may not be aware of all root problems of a specific issues and this will limit their ability to describe and, in turn, to search for similar past problems. A very simple example of such scenario is when a student have horrible homesick and looking for a solution for his issue. His search for similar issues may be limited by his knowledge about the issue itself. In other words, he may not be aware that this issue may be related to the types of his friends.

In order to improve TrustPal effectiveness in searching for similar issues and help the users to get full picture about their issues, semantic web technologies were utilized. This was implemented by developing a semantic search engine. The below figure shows the concept of the semantic search engine.

semantic search

 

  • TrustPal ontology utilized SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) ontology as a base.
  • Using RDF storage instead of relational database to store students experiences (i.e. In a form of posts and discussion). RDF storage will allow to use SPARQL as a query engine instead of SQL.
  • RDF storage in this framework represent the knowledge stored in TrustPal (i.e. posts, and discussions)
  • Using SPARQL will provide high flexibility and consistency in data querying.

 

Advantages of implementing semantic search engine:

  • Students are able to search for related problems by concept instead of keywords. For instance, if the user (i.e. student) search for an issue by keyword language difficulties, then the semantic engine will retrieve all the related issues even if that keywords are not specified.
  • Students will be able to understand the root and all related problems of the issue they are looking for solve.
  • Interlinking between the different issues is of a great benefit for the users as it will give them full picture and insight of the different solutions as well as the related issues.

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by | April 28, 2015 · 6:45 pm

Technical Demo

This post demonstrate the core communication between TrustPal server, university database, and the users (i.e. Students) . The architecture took into consideration hiding the real account (i.e. Students details) from other TrustPal users by associating users’ nickname (that users choose in their first login) with their real university account in the back-end (i.e. Application server).

 

 

 

1) TrustPal user will login with his/her account of the university.

2) The application will verify the account though a communication with university database.

3) University database will authenticate the account and return boolean result (i.e Either the login account is correct or not).

4) TrustPal server will associate the username (i.e. email address) with the user nickname that is store at TrustPal database.

 

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by | April 26, 2015 · 9:19 pm

Links to related news items in the tech media

This post will review some news related to the area of our suggested application (TrustPal).

Academic Advising:

It seems that online academic advising becomes the trend for number of universities. University of Colorado Boulder launched new academic advising service based on constituent relationship management (CRM) platform. The new system called MyCUHub. Students on the university will be able to login to the system though their normal accounts. In fact, the system will work only to facilitate number of tasks related to academic advising but not to provide instant communication (i.e. online chat) with advisors. [1]

Number of articles talks about the usage of social media in academic advising. Reyjunco [2] refused the idea of using technology as a replacement of face-to-face consultation. Whereas, he emphasis that technology can be of a great support in academic consultation arena. Reyjunco stated: “I’ve long theorized that social networking website use was not a “waste of time” (as many of my colleagues put it) but an important vehicle for student self-expression and connection.”

 

Future of Anonymous chat: [3] [4]

The most recent anonymous chat that most of the news talk about is Rooms, the new application from Facebook. Rooms lets users to create their own chat rooms without the need to reveal any of their data. “Users can have dialogue around basically anything they want”. The users can reach all of the application features without even linking Rooms application with their Facebook account. Facebook is aiming to compete with other anonymous chatting application like Secret and Whisper.

Some articles looks to the recent Facebook application as a “middle ground in the battle over anonymity on the internet.”:

“Released last week, the new Facebook app is a place where you can chat with other like-minded people about most anything, from the World Series to 18th century playwrights, and because you needn’t use your real name when joining one of its chat rooms, you have a freedom to express yourself that you wouldn’t have on, say, the main Facebook app.”

 

References:

[1]        L. Meyer, “CU Boulder Launches Academic Advising Hub Online,” 2015. [Online]. Available: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/14/cu-boulder-launches-academic-advising-hub-online.aspx.

[2]        Reyjunco, “Academic advising, social media, and student engagement,” 2010. [Online]. Available: http://blog.reyjunco.com/academic-advising-social-media-and-student-engagement.

[3]        D. ALBA, “The Future of Anonymity on the Internet Is Facebook Rooms,” 2014. [Online]. Available: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/facebook-rooms-future-anonymity-internet/.

[4]        Z. Blaszkiewicz, “Why Rooms is not the future of anonymous chat,” 2014. [Online]. Available: http://features.en.softonic.com/why-rooms-is-not-the-future-of-anonymous-chat.

 

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by | · 9:18 pm

Related Academic work (Technical)

This post review the recent technologies, methods and tools that has been developed in the effort of developing ‘similar’ applications to the one we are suggesting: TrustPal. The review covers number of research papers in addition registered patents.

Recommending common interest users to each other:

This section will review the academic literature that suggest framework and tools to match common users with common interest. This feature can be useful in our application by automated the selection of chatting parts.

  • Method and system for initiating conversations between callers having common interests [1]:

This patent suggest a framework for communication to find common interest between the registered users (i.e. the callers). Although the method does not specify the online communication, it suggest a way to match users (i.e. callers) with common interest.

  • Method and apparatus for recommending a match to another [2]:

This invention main idea is to provide and recommending ‘a match to another’. “The invention provides people with a way to take an active role in matchmaking between a friend, family member or client of theirs and a prospect date from a database of prospect-users.”

 

Anonymous communications:

This section will discuss the related works in field anonymous communications.

  • Method and system for enabling anonymous communications between two or more interested parties [3]:

This patent if very well suited to the framework of our suggested application. The patent presents a method and system for “communicating anonymously between two (or more) parties until such time that the parties may wish to reveal their identities to each other.”

  • Communication between parties over the internet without revealing personal or security information[4] :

Although this patent was presented to be implemented for voice communication, the suggested framework can be used in online chat systems. The idea is based on generating a code by the user to be used in conducting anonymous communications.

 

References:

[1]        S. Okon and R. Tal, “Method and system for initiating conversations between callers having common interests.” Google Patents, 2003.

[2]        J. Y. Shapira, “Method and apparatus for recommending a match to another.” Google Patents, 2006.

[3]        P. Richard, “Method and system for enabling anonymous communications between two or more interested parties.” Google Patents, 2013.

[4]        C. Y. Liu and W. H. Chang, “Communication between parties over the internet without revealing personal or security information.” Google Patents, 2011.

 

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