Bilal Zaka

• Doctor of Technology
• COMSATS University Islamabad

Websites present information or services but often do not allow users to provide feedback or ask questions. The topic of this paper is to first discuss various types of interactivities that are currently available, and then explain what one would expect from advanced systems. The article makes it clear that much has still to be developed. We start...

When we read a printed paper, document or book we sometimes come to points that we do not understand or where we feel important information is missing, or plain wrong, as we can show by examining a particularly reliable collection of data. Yet we can just shrug our shoulders, since contacting the source of the information is at least very cumbersom...

In this paper we describe lessons we have learnt from building up a webserver with reliable information over a period of ten years. We show how we have tried to overcome often encountered weaknesses and thus encourage the community to follow our suggestions. We also point out that much research and development work remains to be carried out.

The increase in digitization of conventional books and other forms of print media suggests that digital or e-books are not a passing phenomenon. Present day digital library systems may have transformed the conventional processes into digital environment, however little development work has been done for the progression of traditional library busine...

In this paper we argue that by using software that allows to add all kinds of interactions and media to digital books we can create what we will call interactive books (IBs for short) that are attractive to use for many purposes of information communication, be it as guide-book, handbook, manual or instructional material like in e-Learning systems....

This paper documents how the adoption of digital games by academia reshapes the current worldview by bringing the potential answers for all learning issues. The central objective of this study is to investigate the extent to which digital games can impact learning effectiveness, and to what extent these games can be used as supplementary elements f...

Recent years have seen an escalating interest in the use of digital games in pursuit of educational goals. The present research also examined the impact of using digital games on learning in higher education. Female participants (N=46) from a women university in Pakistan were assigned to an experimental condition. The effect of game design with mod...

The constant rise in demand for higher education has become the biggest challenge for educational planners. This high demand has paved a way for distance education across the globe. This article innovatively analyzes the policy documentation of a major distance education initiative in Pakistan for validity that will identify the utility of policy l...

As part of higher education, universities have been increasing their efforts to promote learning growth and innovation. In Pakistan private and public institutions of higher educations have undertaken eLearning initiatives. This article draws from the research literature and a preliminary descriptive study to describe the current status of eLearnin...

In today's world the most discussed priorities of modern universities is the solution of e-learning. It is becoming a global issue and everyone is paying attention towards e-learning approaches and strategies that what strategy must be used in order to create a learning environment. This paper is based on description about some of the existent meth...

In educational institutions and corporate environments e-learning is becoming an increasingly important teaching and learning mode. The quality evaluation in e-learning is very important for making courses taught in this mode at par with that of formal education. This paper comprises of different dimensions of e-learning and explains how quality ma...

This paper explains how collaborative efforts in terms of technology and content, can help improve plagiarism detection and prevention. It presents a web service oriented architecture, which utilizes the collective strength of various search engines, context matching algorithms and indexing contributed by users. The proposed framework is an open so...

Although the use of advanced computing and communications technology has made learning a significantly richer experience for learners, it also introduces greater ease in committing academic cheating. There is a growing increase of internet usage in educational communities. Powerful search engines and media gateways gives an ease of access to wide s...

With hundreds of millions of users already today,virtual worlds will become an important factor in tomorrow's media landscape. In a virtual world, users are represented by so-called avatars. These avatars move around the virtual world, communicate with each other,and interact with the virtual world. The movements of these avatars can be tracked pre...

The economies of virtual worlds are driven by the exchange of virtual good and services. These goods are available in the form of image textures, 3D objects, and scripts. The theft or unauthorized use of these goods was and still is a serious problem for virtual world users and content providers. In our work we try to point out various aspects of I...

The measurement of similarity between different objects is the fundamental function of any information retrieval, management, or data mining application. There are a number of ways to compute similarity or dissimilarity among various object representations. In a simplified classification these can be categorized as distance based, geometric, st...

The contemporary information infrastructure gives way to a massive offer of news sources and subsequently news contents. Finding such sources and filtering relevant news according to personal preferences is a time-consuming task in the daily effort to stay informed. Moreover many of these sources are not accessible when spare time to read news is a...

In subjects, where a major part of the education is based on visual information, like geosciences, architecture or civil engineering, this information is often tied to a specific location. Field studies and excursions are thus an essential part of the education in such subjects. This paper describes an application designed to bring the advantages o...

The recent yearspsila changes in the Web and its application have also had an enormous impact on learning. This paper discusses a shift of Web based learning systems towards scalable web learning services. It provides an overview of current state of development and evolution path of Web based learning systems. Desired characteristics of modern syst...

The advances in technology have made academic cheating far too easy for learners. Furthermore, the World-Wide-Web has brought about a widespread culture of easy-access to all sorts of information, thus reducing the need for learners to perform diligent research or study. E-learning systems would then need to incorporate the monitoring and checking...

Large collections of learning content, developed using applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint can be found in numerous institutions and organizations. The reusability of such custom-made learning content are however not supported in traditional applications. There is a need to annotate the available learning objects with suitable meta-data at va...

Plagiarism in the sense of "theft of intellectual property" has been around for as long as humans have produced work of art and research. However, easy access to the Web, large databases, and telecommunication in general, has turned plagiarism into a serious problem for publishers, researchers and educational institutions. In this paper, we concent...

This paper suggests a powerful yet so far not used way to assist knowledge workers: while they are working on a problem, a system in the background is continuously checking to determine if similar or helpful material has not been published before, elsewhere. The technique described aims to reduce effort and time required to search relevant data on...

A multimodal approach for acquiring personalized news contents, with customized aggregators, collabo- rative & personal content filters is presented. The proposed framework is based on the effectiveness of combined use of taxonomies and folksonomies. This platform is an effort towards extending web 2.0 con- cepts of information selection for variou...