
mohd nor akmal KhalidNational University of Malaysia | ukm · Faculty of Information Science and Technology
mohd nor akmal Khalid
PhD
Working at the intersections of topics between AI, entertainment, and games studies that leads to innovative technology
About
121
Publications
33,846
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Introduction
Currently pursuing research in entertainment science, optimization and search algorithms, and some on machine learning and related topics. The domain of interest, in particular, is game-related research and information science in general, which also includes, but not limited to, manufacturing, crowd modeling, and game informatics.
Additional affiliations
December 2018 - present
January 2014 - February 2014
Education
September 2015 - October 2018
September 2013 - July 2015
July 2009 - July 2013
Publications
Publications (121)
With the increasing pressure from the market and the surge of “Industry 4.0,” staying competitive and relevant is becoming more and more difficult. The assembly line, which represents a long-term investment of the manufacturing industry, needs to be efficiently utilized. While assembly line balancing (ALB) problem had been studied for decades, over...
Over history, games have served multiple purposes. It serves as a fun activity for players who need the entertainment to become test-beds for artificial intelligence. Solving games is beneficial in providing a better understanding of how information is progressing throughout the game. Uncertainty in games affects the way a game is solved and the wa...
The gaming industry had rapidly been expanding globally, where it encompasses more than the purpose of recreational and increasingly becomes more immersive and engaging, and potentially leads to pathological gaming behaviors that lead to addiction. Such experience of engagement and addiction involves understanding the fundamental functions of the h...
Game refinement theory has been studied to derive a measurement of game sophistication. Recently, it has been developed as physics in mind, which may relate to the state of player's feelings such as satisfaction and comfort in mind. This article explores a link between game refinement theory and reinforcement schedule. A notion of winning hardness...
The development of games had been seen as an essential field of study in artificial intelligence. Although game concepts have been adopted in various problem domains, understanding the nature of game playing’s underlying mechanism has been limited. This study investigates such a mechanism by adopting a logistic model of game outcome uncertainty whe...
In the rapidly expanding domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), ensuring the implementation of robust security measures such as authentication has become paramount to safeguarding sensitive data and maintaining the integrity of connected devices. Symmetry in the IoT commonly denotes the uniformity or equilibrium in data distribution and processing...
Satellite communication (SatCom) is essential in modern telecommunication infrastructure, providing global connectivity and overcoming limitations of the terrestrial network. With the emergence of vertical heterogeneous networks (VHetNets) integrating terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, authentication becomes crucial to address security chall...
Forecasting inpatient and outpatient visits is essential for successful resource allocation and clinical decision-making. The techniques used by previous researchers for forecasting, primarily based on statistical approaches, which often require extensive data preprocessing and expert knowledge, can be time-consuming and difficult. Therefore, this...
Advanced persistent threat (APT) refers to a specific form of targeted attack used by a well-organized and skilled adversary to remain undetected while systematically and continuously exfiltrating sensitive data. Various APT attack vectors exist, including social engineering techniques such as spear phishing, watering holes, SQL injection, and appl...
Recently, accurate predicting outpatient visits is crucial in healthcare for optimizing service delivery and resource allocation. Time series models, particularly Deep Learning (DL) methods, have gained popularity in predicting demand and can potentially be used to predict demand for medical services, including outpatient hospital visits. This stud...
Cybersecurity has become a prominent issue in regard to ensuring information privacy and integrity in the internet age particularly with the rise of interconnected devices. However, advanced persistent threats (APTs) pose a significant danger to the current contemporary way of life, and effective APT detection and defense are vital. Game theory is...
The digital marketplace has rapidly grown, transitioning the market of video games from physical localized experiences to more networked, expanded, virtual spaces. With a highly competitive business market, platform governance policy allows for the emergence of rapidly growing publishing platforms for digital video games such as the Steam platform....
BACKGROUND
Health rumors arbitrarily spread in mainstream social media on the internet. Health rumors emerged in China during the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020. Many midelders/elders (age over 40 years) who lived in Wuhan believed these rumors.
OBJECTIVE
This study focused on designing a serious game as an experimental program to prevent and...
Background
Health rumors arbitrarily spread in mainstream social media on the internet. Health rumors emerged in China during the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020. Many midelders/elders (age over 40 years) who lived in Wuhan believed these rumors.
Objective
This study focused on designing a serious game as an experimental program to prevent and...
Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) have been considerably used for assessing the individual’s performance in various contexts. The optimal number of options in MCQs is a debatable issue, followed by contradictions and discussions, and is needed for a firm conclusion from empirical and hypothetical findings. This study aims to link theoretical concept...
The long short-term memory (LSTM) approach has evolved into cutting-edge machine learning techniques. It belongs to the category of deep learning algorithms orig-inating from Deep Recurrent Neural Network (DRNN) forms. In recent years, time series analysis and forecasting utilizing LSTM can be found in various domains, including fi-nance, supply an...
From the perspective of audiences, game refinement (GR) theory is a theory and measurement that was frequently used to assess the enjoyment and complex features of games. We conjectured that when we play a strategy game, there is a physical information process in our minds which subject to Newton’s laws. It focuses on the uncertainty of game outcom...
Soccer (or association football) is now the most popular sports game in the world. Various underlying factors may explain its reasons to be popular. However, there is no underlying explanation as to why the nature of the game processes was appealing to all people of all ages. However, measuring such subjective metric were empirically challenging an...
Climate change is amongst the most serious issues nowadays. Climate change has become a concern for the scientific community as it could affect human health. Researchers have found that climate change potentially impacts human mental health, especially among depressive patients. However, the relationship is still unclear and needs further investiga...
A good solo player is not necessarily a good team player. Team games add an extra aspect to games: teamwork, which may increase the skill ceiling to master the game. The responsibility towards the outcome of the game will be divided among all the players in the team, where having more players might make the game easier as the responsibility of each...
The game ’Mafia’ is a logic puzzle that has been a top-rated party game played worldwide. Many studies have been dedicated to determining the best character combination to keep players engaged while analyzing the overall death toll. Although it has only two-sided plays, there are multiple combinations of characters in which each character’s rules a...
People have enjoyed solving puzzles for decades because of the challenge and the satisfaction derived from solving problems. However, although previous researches focused on the puzzle’s complexity, strategy, and solving automatically, few studies worked on sorting out puzzles from a solvability way related to the stochastic elements among the solv...
Technology advancements allowed the development of action games that packed multifaceted play in a single game while requiring fast-paced movements. Since modern action game is composed of boss battles, evaluating them was scarcely investigated. In this study, the analysis of the boss battle was conducted based on the God of War (GoW) series, where...
A physical phenomenon represented through a sudden change of acceleration, termed ‘jerk’ (or jolt), is a compelling phenomenon that humans feel and has been seen in practical application in comfort and wear-and-tear effects in mechanical and engineering domains (for instance, in a daily situation, jerk can be experienced when we take an elevator)....
The attraction of games comes from the player being able to have fun in games. Gambling games that are based on the Variable-Ratio schedule in Skinner’s experiment are the most typical addictive games. It is necessary to clarify the reason why typical gambling games are simple but addictive. Also, the Multiarmed Bandit game is a typical test for Sk...
Challenges in education have continuously been addressed by integrating gamification, but a gap remains for game design principles that support user engagement. This paper outlines results obtained from integrating challenge-based gamification into an elementary school classroom to examine the emergence of student engagement and learning-related be...
Artificial intelligence (AI) had emphasized functional utility and performance optimization, while entertainment science synthesized the foundation of entertainment by aggregating value functions and reward systems. AI search and game environment provided the utility to identify entertaining elements as a new form of the scientific venture but lack...
An arcade game is one of the earliest forms of electronic entertainment in the history of modern video games. Although arcade games have simple rules, people retain their interest and remain enjoyable on the game-playing experience. Since arcade games were considered infinite games in general, this study investigates arcade games’ nature to mechani...
The intersection of artificial intelligence and entertainment science via games had led to fruitful development in both fields. Empathic technology in the entertainment medium is a promising trend that bridges both worlds. This workshop provides the discussion space for those interested in its application, societal issues, risks, and best practices...
The first AIES workshop, conducting in conjunction with the IFIP-ICEC conference (https://www.ifip-icec.org), aims to establish a discussion panel at the intersections of artificial intelligence (AI) and entertainment science areas. The theme is "towards empathic entertainment technology." By utilizing entertainment computing activities, such as vi...
The manufacturing industry has evolved in the past few years due to the competitive global economy where the performance of its assembly line operations is primarily dependent upon optimum resource utilization. The assembly line operations are balanced among the available resources to obtain an equal amount of workload to achieve optimum resource u...
The compensation system called komi has been used in scoring games such as Go. In Go, White (the second player) is at a disadvantage because Black gets to move first, giving that player an advantage; indeed, the winning percentage for Black is higher. The perceived value of komi has been re-evaluated over the years to maintain fairness. However, th...
Due to the advent of the Internet, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have been enjoyed worldwide by many players simultaneously, and game publishers’ revenues have reached billions of dollars from subscriptions alone. Frequent updates (e.g., versioning) and new contents (e.g., quest system) are the typical strategies adopted...
Forecasting the financial time series had been a difficult endeavor for both academia and businesses. Advances of the financial time series forecasting had moved from traditional techniques to automated and intelligent techniques that based on machine learning and deep learning. However, many methods of automatic forecasting have been tailored to t...
Competitiveness and rapid expansion of flexible manufacturing system (FMS) as one of the industrial alternatives has attracted many practitioners’ and academicians’ interest. Recent globalization events have further encouraged FMS development into distributed, self-reliant units of production center. The flexible manufacturing system in distributed...
The notion of comfort with respect to rides, such as roller coasters, is typically addressed from the perspective of a physical ride, where the convenience of transportation is redefined to minimize risk and maximize thrill. As a popular form of entertainment, roller coasters sit at the nexus of rides and games, providing a suitable environment to...
The game refinement theory focuses on the game designer perspective, where its application in various types of games provides evidence of the occurring paradigm shift. Utilizing the logistical model of game outcome uncertainty, it provides a platform for incorporating gamified experience observed in games to be adopted in domains outside of game wh...
Credit card fraud is a serious and growing problem. It is becoming more challenging with an issues of highly imbalanced class. In the field of data mining, prediction or typically known as data classification problem involved detecting events. Uncommon events are hard to identify on account of their inconsistency and casualness, however, misclassif...
The advent of industrial 4.0 ushered a new era in the manufacturing industry where merely optimizing the available resources is not enough to fulfill the need of the growing market. Various approaches have addressed the assembly line balancing (ALB) problem for decades. Although solving the ALB problem is crucial, a bottleneck may still occur over...
The 8-sliding puzzle game, with its characteristic, is beneficial to human logical training and well-known single-agent game worldwide. This study is interested in determining the attractiveness of the game by analyzing the inner mechanism of the game. By adopting total steps to solve the game and the success rate as the game progress model, the ga...
Analyzing the effect of value change in the MIN/-MAX search algorithm towards gameplay can be challenging. The single conspiracy number (SCN) is an indicator that can reflect such information. In this paper, SCN is utilized to identify different factors and analyze patterns that influenced a 5-in-a-row game called GoBang. SCN values from various Go...
This paper explores the nature of the Go game. Go has been played on different size of the board in its long history where it was born in 2356 BC and played on 9×9 board, and later played on 13×13, 15×15, 17×17, 19×19, and 21×21 board. Self-play experiments using an open-source implementation of AlphaZero, namely LeelaZero, as the artificial intell...
Variants of best-first search algorithms and their expansions have continuously been introduced to solve challenging problems. The probability-based proof number search (PPNS) is a best-first search algorithm that can be used to solve positions in AND/OR game tree structures. It combines information from explored (based on winning status) and unexp...
DouDiZhu, a multiplayer game with incomplete information, is the most popular card game in China. Although there are many DouDiZhu card games in the world, the specific characteristics of classical DouDiZhu card games are a harmonious combination of player numbers, player characters (landlords and peasants), deck numbers, and scoring systems. Howev...
Game refinement theory has been used as a reliable tool for measuring the attractiveness and entertainment of games, which is derived from a game information progress model and has been applied in various games. This study aims to explore the entertainment of popular multiplayer game-Chinese checkers. The experiments in this study investigated the...
This paper explores an innovative way to find the comfortable settings of a newly designed game under development using a computer program. A Japanese crossword game ‘MyoGo Renju’ has been chosen as a benchmark for this research, whereas some important aspects such as fairness and engagement are evaluated to find the most optimum settings for the p...
This paper incorporates discussion about game refinement theory and the flow model to analyze simulation data collected from two types of arcade games. A mathematical model of the arcade game processes is formulated. The essence of the arcade games is verified through the game-playing processes of players. In particular, challenge setup could contr...
Gomoku (also called "Five in a row") is one of the earliest popular checkerboard games invented by humans. In computing research, a tree-based data structure and its branching factor is the common technique of analyzing such board game. While eye-tracking techniques have been used for decades in interpreting human behaviors and improving human-comp...
Hearthstone is an attractive and tactical card collection game and has millions of monthly active users (MAU) all over the world. In this research, the entertainment assessment of Hearthstone is measured by using the game refinement (GR) theory. Previous studies have reported that GR measure is a reliable tool to measure sophistication of board gam...
This paper explores a new perspective of finding the best tournament structures by focusing on two aspects (apart from the number of matches): competitiveness development and ranking precision. Competitiveness development emphasizes the importance of participants’ motivation while keeping the matches exciting whereas ranking precision reflects the...
Table tennis is one of the most popular sports in the world. With a history of just over 100 years, table tennis has slowly become the seventh-largest sport in the world. However, it is unclear whether the improvement actually makes the game better or worst. As such, a consistent quantification approach is needed. In this paper, game refinement (GR...
The game refinement (GR) theory has been applied to many different games for quantifying their entertaining impacts. It is assumed that when playing any type of game, the game information progress is encoded and transported in our mind, and it is likely that the acceleration of that information is subject to the forces and laws of physics; thus, GR...
Artificial intelligence (AI) has a long-standing and healthy relationship with games where it becomes a popular application area for AI-driven research such as game playing, game design and so on. With the recent advancement of AI game-playing programs that had exceeded human capabilities, fairness becomes an important issue to be addressed in orde...
This paper presents two directions of game evolution using the multiplayer incomplete information game-Mahjong and two-person complete information game-Chess. The directions of these games show the transitions from higher uncertainty to lower uncertainty and vice versa, whereas the game refinement measure (GR) had been employed for the assessment....
Games are attractive and engaging due to the complexity they pose to the player. Some games are complex enough which made them attractive to play. However, popular games would lose their attractiveness due to the large advantage of initiative. High-performance AI like AlphaZero suggests from their actual games played that advantage of the first pla...
This paper explores the entertainment environment that focuses on platform transformation based on the respond of the user's demand. Improvement factor has been introduced to identify the key concept that was related to the perceived enjoyment. A player model was analyzed based on the perspective of user psychology. Scale-Rating questionnaires were...
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in learning through games. However, learning through games has never been measured; thus, failed to attract many investors in this field. As such, the goal of this paper is to identify the concept of progress curves in edutainment games using the proposed "Curiosity Model" or momentumin-mind. The i...
This paper explores the nature of DouDiZhu which is an incomplete-information multi-player game and the most popular card game in China. While there are many DouDiZhu-like card games in the world, standard DouDiZhu card game is particularly characterized by its harmonic combination of several factors including the number of players , player's roles...
This paper explores the nature of DouDiZhu which is an incomplete-information multi-player game and the most popular card game in China. While there are many DouDiZhu-like card games in the world, standard DouDiZhu card game is particularly characterized by its harmonic combination of several factors including the number of players, player’s roles...