Dear CCSE Community,

You are all cordially invited to attend this week’s two seminars by our CCSE graduate students. The seminars will take place December 24 at 2:30 pm in Building 22: Room 119. In addition, we will have one guest speaker, Mr. Ahmed Nazer. This week’s seminars are:

Seminar 1

Title: Semantic Approach for Health and Food-Personalized Advices in English and Arabic

Abstract: Web search engines help in retrieving the scattered information from the Web, albeit with a number of limitations. They can’t understand or enrich the user’s natural language questions easily or offer the recommendation that fits the user’s exact needs. Health and food information are examples of critical domains where the users have a lot of questions that need to be understood well, enriched and semantically processed to retrieve answers that match the user’s needs. Using the personalization techniques with the semantic techniques help us to propose a framework that semantically enriches the user’s questions and retrieves more relevant results. In this talk, I will share the results of analyzing the user’s preferences related to the health and food domains, present a user’s profile ontology that represents these preferences and then maps them to the pre-defined domain ontologies. In addition, I will show the proposed framework implementation and share some experimental results.  

Speaker: Mr. Ahmed Nazer

Bio: Mr. Ahmed Ali AlNazer is a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM). Ahmed received his BSc degree in Computer Science in 2001and MSc degree in Computer Science in 2006 both from KFUPM. Ahmed’s research areas include information retrieval, semantic web, data mining, steganography, security applications, software engineering, personalization, search engines technologies and enterprise search. Ahmed has published several technical papers and conducted technical researches and participated in many scientific conferences. He delivered couple of seminars & public lectures in IEEE and local conferences.

Seminar 2

Title:  Comparative Analysis of Modern Ransomware

Abstract: The (re)surface of a new type of malware, Ransomware, is starting to threaten industrial organizations and government agencies. We will be discussing some of the recent ransomwares that appeared in the past years and provide comparative analysis of two devastating ones, namely: Reveton and CryptoLocker . The research will also discuss their spread architecture shedding the light on Zeus, GameOver Zeus, and Exploit Kits. Some possible prevention and reactive methods that were implemented to takedown their operations will be discussed as well.

Speaker:  Mr. Yasir Alagl

Bio: Mr. Yasir Alagl is a Software Engineer and a Security Liaison Officer in Saudi Aramco. He earned his Bachelor degree in Software Engineering from KFUPM in 2012. Currently, he is perusing his Master’s degree in Security & Information Assurance program where he is interested in Cryptography and Security in general.

Seminar 3

Title:  Real-Time Pose Estimation for Non-Western Clothed Player Using Kinect Camera

Abstract: In 2011, Microsoft revealed the algorithm used in their implementation of Kinect human pose recognition system (Jamie Shotton, 2011). Microsoft research team employed a random forest classifier to train the system to identify body parts location and thus propose a 3D positions for the joints. (Jamie Shotton, 2011) claims that their system would estimate body parts invariant to pose, body shape, clothing, etc. I believe they meant western-clothing. Unlike western jeans or sport pants, in many cultures, people wear a single piece of fabric that covers the entire body. In such cases, the lower body would look like a concrete opaque square in a 2D image hiding all the spatial details of the left or right thighs, knees, and legs. In this research, we evaluate the performance of the present Kinect’s human skeletonization system on cases where the body frame will include people wearing non-western clothes and propose our solution to detect or infer the lower body parts in such cases.

Speaker:  Mr. Ridwan Jalali

Bio: Mr. Ridwan  Jalali graduated from Colorado State University CSU. He joined KFUPM on 2012 as a part time student. He is working with Aramco Simulation Systems Department. He is also working with dr. Adel for my master thesis in Computer Vision.

Regards,

Dr. Mohamed El-Attar

Associate Professor :: Software Engineering

Information and Computer Science Department

King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

​