Kuwait University
College of Life Sciences

Information Science Department
ABET Accredited in General Computing

Department Seminars

Academic Year (2015-2016)

  • Apr 27, 2016: Seminar by Prof. Muhammad Sarfraz (Title: Splines and Computer Graphics)
  • Mar 23, 2016: Seminar by Bentolhoda Bahrani, department master students supervised by Prof Kassem, in preparation of defending her thesis (Title: Enabling Patient Centered Health Care System: Requirements for Making Patient Assume Responsibility of Their Health)
  • Feb 22, 2016: Seminar by Prof. Paul Manuel (Title: Software Engineering and Programming Language)
  • Dec 2, 2015: Seminar by Prof. Muhammad Sarfraz (Title: An Intelligent System for Online Signature Verification)
  • Nov 4, 2015: Seminar by Prof. Jehad Al Dallal (Title: Identifying Refactoring Opportunities in Object-Oriented Code - A Systematic Literature Review)
  • Oct 12, 2015: Seminar by Prof. Paul Manuel (Title: A Bridge Too Far)



Seminar Abstracts


Splines and Computer Graphics

Prof. Muhammad Sarfraz

Computer Graphics (CG) is a significant area of study and practice in the world of computing today. In addition to its critical importance in the traditional fields of automobile, aircraft manufacturing, shipbuilding, shoe industry, and general product design, more recently, the CG has proven to be indispensable in a variety of modern industries, including robotics, medical imaging, visualization, Textile, Fashion, Painting, Art, Archeology, Games and even media and many others. This presentation aims to provide and enlighten on the tool of splining for CG. In addition to history and introduction to splines, a new spline method would be introduced. Specific concentration would be made on the applications of proposed spline to CG. The talk is going to focus a variety of applications and examples necessary for various real life problems. The major goal of the talk is to stimulate views and provide a source where researchers and practitioners can find the latest developments in the field.

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Enabling Patient Centered Health Care System:
Requirements for Making Patient Assume Responsibility of Their Health

Bentolhoda Bahrani

This study investigated the requirement for patient centered health information system to make patients assume responsibility of their health and play an active role in health or treatment process.
The overall research goal was that to investigate the requirements of patient centered health information system that can be expected to result in creating a health information system where the patients can assume the responsibility of their health through using the system. The goal of this thesis was not to create the system, yet to provide the basic requirements for creating the above-mentioned system.
Since there was not an encompassing approach in the literature that addresses requirements for making patient assume responsibility by using patient centered health care information system this study took the first step for enabling patients centered health care system by documenting requirements for both reactive and proactive patients which could provide the guidance for software development and designers to create patient centered heath care information system where patients assume responsibility of their health and are the main building block of the system.
For gathering requirements studying documentation, ethnography, and introspection techniques were utilized. User story technique was used to document and present the requirements. Finding and conclusion highlighted the requirements for health information system to make both reactive and proactive patients assume responsibility of their health.

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An Intelligent System for Online Signature Verification

Prof. Muhammad Sarfraz

Online Signature Verification is one of the most feasible biometric authentication techniques and is being widely researched worldwide. This presentation would address some of the popular approaches towards Online Signature Verification together with an abstraction of the general process involved in these approaches. Additionally, the talk proposes a new technique. The most critical area in this process has identified to be that of feature selection. This is because a vast number of features are available for online signature verification. An implementation of an online signature verification system has been done with a selection of features and has been evaluated with test data available from reliable sources. The comparison showed that the selected features with the thresholds applied performed reasonably fine. Several lines of experiments with the developed online verification system have been suggested to test for further improved performance.

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Identifying Refactoring Opportunities in Object-Oriented Code - A Systematic Literature Review

Prof. Jehad Al Dallal

Identifying refactoring opportunities in object-oriented code is an important stage that precedes the actual refactoring process. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature to identify opportunities for various refactoring activities. The talk presents a research paper that provides a systematic literature review (SLR) of existing studies identifying opportunities for code refactoring activities. The SLR involved performing an automatic search of the relevant digital libraries for potentially relevant studies published through the end of 2013, performing pilot and author-based searches, and selecting 47 primary studies (PSs) based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. The PSs were analyzed based on a number of criteria, including the refactoring activities, the approaches to refactoring opportunity identification, the empirical evaluation approaches, and the data sets used.

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A Bridge Too Far

Prof. Paul Manuel

In this seminar, we will discuss the history of two big challenges posed to computer scientists:

  1. For a given mathematical problem, is there an algorithm to solve it in a finite number of steps?
  2. Can we build a computer that solves problems like longest path problem or Cramer method of simultaneous solutions in a reasonable time?

We will also discuss some interesting facts and controversies about the inventor of the first digital computer.

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