Chen, Julia, Pauli Lai, Aulina Chan, Vicky Man, and Chi-Ho Chan. 2023. “AI-Assisted Enhancement of Student Presentation Skills: Challenges and Opportunities” Sustainability 15, no. 1: 196. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010196

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Pauli P.Y. Lai, “Cramming Versus Spaced Learning Induced by Strategic Design of Game-based Learning Platform,” Proceedings, the International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (IEEE TALE2022), Dec 2022, Hong Kong.

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Pauli Lai and Chi-Ho Chan, “Combating Challenges of Overseas Service-Learning in the Pandemic,” Proceedings, the 4th International Conference on Service-Learning (ICSL2022), Dec 2022, Hong Kong.

Pauli P.Y. Lai, “Engaging Students Through Technology-Enhanced Interactive Activities Outside the Classroom,” in Applied Degree Education and the Future of Learning, Christina Hong and Will W.K. Ma, Ed. Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2022, pp. 395-420, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9812-5.

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ABSTRACT

The future of I.T. relies on the next generation and the knowledge of the next generation is built up today. However, the current I.T. education in Cambodia is often based on not properly trained teachers. There are also very few well-trained I.T. people working in the education field or I.T. industry in Cambodia. This will form an adverse cycle and the situation will never improve if no revolution is brought to I.T. education in this country. In this regard, it is proposed to offer a servicelearning subject that helps reduce the gap of I.T. education between Cambodia and the developed countries. The objectives are to train the students, teachers and technical staff in Cambodia with proper I.T. knowledge. It is aimed to produce more well-trained I.T. people in Cambodian workforce so that Cambodian can help themselves for sustainable I.T. education in future.

ABSTRACT

The use of mobile devices to access the World Wide Web is becoming more prevalent. When browsing webpages on small-screen devices, it is difficult to locate information of interest since the limited screen space can be fully packed with information. Also, browsing Web tables on small-screen devices is a non-trivial problem. To fit a large table in a small-screen device, the association between data values and their corresponding headers may be disrupted. It is difficult to locate information accurately if the data meanings are lost. For visually impaired users, the problem is even more challenging. Sequential presentation of the webpage by a screen reader is too time-consuming if the information of interest is placed at or near the end of the webpage. Therefore, there is a need to re-organize useful information in webpages in order to enhance information finding on small-screen devices. In this thesis, various adaptations are proposed by exploring and exploiting relationships between Web elements in the webpage. In the current literature, some proposed heuristics are based on specific HTML elements, which cannot be generalized. Some other algorithms assume a correct DOM structure, which would fail if the webpage is not properly marked up. Many algorithms extract blocks without assigning them the proper titles. A gap needs to be filled, such that extracted blocks will be given a proper title through exploring the relationships between semantic elements. In this thesis, I propose to integrate relationship analysis and DOM-tree structure traversal for identifying logical sections together with their section headings. By extracting all the section headings, a table of content can be constructed to provide direct access to interested sections in an efficient way. Relationship analysis is a critical complement to the DOM structure for identifying the semantic content hierarchy when a webpage is not properly marked up. By exploring relationships between table cells, the structure of an unstructured Web table can be extracted. The semantic meanings of the data values are retained by preserving the data values and their corresponding headers. A novel way of accessing a webpage, which converts the page itself and its Web table into menu-based presentation, is then proposed. Converting the webpage into an Interactive Voice Response System introduces yet another mode of access which can enhance the accessibility of the webpage. In addition to improving mobile accessibility, the proposed adaptations can also benefit the visually impaired users. Experiments show that the average effectiveness and efficiency of adaptation with direct access are improved by 18% and 15% respectively, which are clearly better than the case without adaptation. Also, by adapting the Web table into a series of menu pages, the effectiveness and efficiency are improved by 61% and 37% respectively. For the evaluations with visually impaired users, the adaptation with direct access can greatly improve efficiency by 85%. Some complicated Web tables in fact could not be properly interpreted by visually impaired users; the Web table adaptation makes them accessible. Information finding indeed becomes more efficient and effective when using the adapted versions.

ABSTRACT

Web table understanding is usually difficult for blind people. They depend on screen readers to convey the table information. However, if the table is large, the user may have long forgotten the heading before the last row is read. On the other hand, it is also difficult for users to view a large web table on a small-screen device. It usually requires extensive scrolling to view a large table with small-screen display. When the last row or last column is reached, the associated headers are probably out of screen and thus the meaning of data values is lost. These unstructured web tables arises a need for mobile and web accessibility improvements. In this regard, we propose a method to extract the structure from these tables and perform adaptation so that the mobile and blind users can perceive and retrieve information from the web table more easily and conveniently.

• • Award: Champion of the Postgraduate Section
  • Award: Overall Champion

ABSTRACT

For the blind people to browse the Web, they could only perceive webpage by alternative sensory channels such as auditory channel or through tactile devices. The most common way for them to access the Internet is to use a Web browser and text-to-speech software. But the problem of using screen reader is that it usually starts reading from the top and traverse the whole webpage sequentially. Even if some screen readers allow tabbing through links or headings, it is still quite time consuming for users to reach their interested section of content. In this regard, it is proposed to adapt a webpage into different logical sections. A number and a descriptive heading would then be assigned to each logical section so that the user is able to explore each section by just pressing the corresponding number. The whole idea is like converting the webpage into an IVRS (Interactive Voice Response Systems) so that the blind people can access the webpage using mobile phone by listening to the list of menu headings and getting into details of the interested section by entering the corresponding number on the keypad.