Iyad Tumar

This paper presents a longitudinal case study of two volunteer-led computer clubs in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank. Combining participatory action research, autoethnography, and follow-up interviews conducted ten years later, we examine how socio-technical infrastructures of learning were built and sustained under intertwined constraints. While the clubs were designed to support children’s engagement with technology, the most meaningful outcomes were reported by the volunteers, whose roles required navigating logistical, interpersonal, and political challenges in resource-constrained settings. Our findings position volunteers as infrastructural actors: they stitched together tools, partnerships, and routines to stabilize the clubs and create a durable social infrastructure. We identify the breadth of work and social structures implicated in volunteering and show how technology mediates these interdependencies. Recognition and care practices (such as debriefs, reflection rituals, acknowledgments) emerge as design requirements for sustaining participation, reflecting a shift from questions of access to recognition observed in feminist hackerspaces. Gendered trajectories reveal how women volunteers negotiated leadership and gained professional capital in male‑dominated contexts. Our longitudinal findings provide an empirical account of an uneven temporality of impact: durable benefits accrue to those performing infrastructural labor (volunteers), whereas short‑term beneficiaries (child participants) recall little after a decade.

This paper introduces a novel approach for developing a learner model for school students by incorporating assessments from multiple sources, including students, parents, and teachers, in addition to exams. Traditional Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) typically rely on a single source, such as exams, which often results in an incomplete picture of a student’s learning needs. To address this limitation, we developed a multi-source ITS that integrates feedback from various stakeholders to enhance the accuracy and personalization of the learner model. In a study involving 75 high school students, participants were divided into three groups: one receiving traditional classroom instruction, one using a conventional ITS, and one using our multi-source ITS. Results showed that the group using the multi-source system demonstrated the greatest improvement, with an average 38% increase in post-test scores, compared to 19% for the traditional instruction group and 26% for the conventional ITS group. Moreover, students using the multi-source ITS reported higher engagement and motivation, driven by their ability to interact with and adjust their learner model. These findings highlight the significant benefits of incorporating multi-source feedback into ITS to boost student performance, engagement, and motivation.

Spectrum sensing in cognitive radio (CR) is a critical process as it directly influences the accuracy of detection. Noise uncertainty affects the reliability of detecting vacant holes in the spectrum, thus limiting the access of that spectrum by secondary users (SUs). In such uncertain environment; SUs sense the received power of a primary user (PU) independently with different measures of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Long sensing time serves in mitigating the effect of noise uncertainty, but on the cost of throughput performance of CR system. In this paper, the scheme of an asynchronous and crossed sensing-reporting is presented. The scheme reduces energy consumption during sensing process without affecting the detection accuracy. Exploiting the included idle time (𝑇𝑖) in sensing time slot; each SU collects power samples with higher SNR directly performs the reporting process to a fusion center (FC) consecutively. The FC terminates the sensing and reporting processes at a specific sensing time that corresponds to the lowest SNR (𝑆𝑁𝑅𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑙). Furthermore, this integrated scheme aims at optimizing the total frame duration (𝑇𝑓). Mathematical expressions of the scheme are obtained. Analytical results show the efficiency of the scheme in terms of energy saving and throughput increment under noise uncerainty.

Software fault prediction (SFP) is a challenging process that any successful software should go through it to make sure that all software components are free of faults. In general, soft computing and machine learning methods are useful in tackling this problem. The size of fault data is usually huge since it is obtained from mining software historical repositories. This data consists of a large number of features (metrics). Determining the most valuable features (i.e., Feature Selection (FS) is an excellent solution to reduce data dimensionality. In this paper, we proposed an enhanced version of the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) by combining it with a single point crossover method. The proposed enhancement helps the WOA to escape from local optima by enhancing the exploration process. Five different selection methods are employed: Tournament, Roulette wheel, Linear rank, Stochastic universal sampling, and random-based. To evaluate the performance of the proposed enhancement, 17 available SFP datasets are adopted from the PROMISE repository. The deep analysis shows that the proposed approach outperformed the original WOA and the other six state-of-the-art methods, as well as enhanced the overall performance of the machine learning classifier.