Hmood Al-Dossari

Workforce policy in the digital era depends on knowing which human capital attributes generate salary returns and through which channels they operate. Two limitations have constrained progress. First, IT-skills research routinely collapses individual competencies into composite indices, masking within-domain heterogeneity. Second, existing studies cannot distinguish whether human capital raises salary directly through within-role productivity or indirectly through access to higher-paying occupational categories. This study addresses both limitations through a sequenced three-stage analytical design applied to survey data from 2,167 IT professionals in Saudi Arabia, an emerging-economy IT labor market shaped by Vision 2030. Stage 1 estimates each predictor unconditional salary association. Stage 2 estimates the joint total effect of all four human capital predictors. Stage 3 adds job category as a structural control to approximate how those associations change after adjusting for occupational category. All three significant predictors: work experience, soft-skill proficiency, and educational attainment; retain roughly four-fifths of their salary association after adjusting for occupational category. The composite Technical Skills Score is silent because positive specializations (Information Security, Cloud Computing) and negative specializations (Network Administration, Technical Support) cancel within the index; disaggregation reveals the underlying heterogeneity. The study provides new empirical evidence separating HCT productivity–access channels at the predictor level and identifies seniority track as a dominant axis of Saudi IT salary stratification.

Online reviews on platforms such as Google Maps strongly influence consumer decisions. However, aggregated ratings mask nuanced opinions about specific aspects such as food, drinks, service, lounge, and price. This study presents a multi-aspect sentiment analysis framework for Arabic café reviews. Specifically, we combine machine learning (Linear SVC, Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest) and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to perform aspect identification and sentiment classification. A rigorous preprocessing and feature-engineering with TF-IDF and n-gram was implemented and statistically validated through bootstrap confidence intervals and Friedman–Nemenyi significance tests. Experimental results demonstrate that Linear SVC with optimized TF-IDF tri-grams achieved a macro-F1 of 0.89 for aspect identification and 0.71 for sentiment classification. Meanwhile, the CNN model yielded a comparable F1 of 0.89 for aspect identification and a higher 0.76 for sentiment classification. The findings highlight that effective feature representation and model selection can substantially improve Arabic opinion mining. The proposed framework provides a reliable foundation for analyzing Arabic user feedback on location-based platforms and supports more interpretable and data-driven business insights. These insights are essential to enhance personalized recommendations and business intelligence in the hospitality sector.

Mobile apps have revolutionized almost every aspect of our daily lives, shaping the way we shop, learn and work. The transformative and unprecedented impact they have made on our lifestyle and the convenience they have offered have increased their adoption in diverse domains. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to hear from the interested audience about their desires and requirements in mobile apps. This has stressed the need to employ crowdsourcing in requirements engineering (RE) activities to harness the scattered talent in the crowd. RE tasks require certain software domain knowledge, hence, selecting a suitable subset of the crowd is crucial to obtain high-quality contributions. For that, we propose a crowd selection approach for crowdsourcing mobile app requirements engineering tasks which leverages the untapped crowd available on the social network Twitter (recently changed to X). This article is an extension of our previous work, where we present the proposed social-network-based crowd selection approach design, continue to work on the remaining component of the approach and evaluate the approach through a controlled experiment. For evaluation, the approach was utilized to select a real crowd that were invited to contribute to crowdsourcing requirements elicitation tasks for a fitness mobile app. The quality of the crowdsourced requirements was assessed by experts and the results have provided encouraging and compelling insights about the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The obtained assessment scores for the five quality factors clarity, creativity, relatedness, feasibility and diversity were respectively 4.36, 4.01, 4.29, 4.45 and 4.43 out of 5. Overall, we believe that the proposed social-network-based crowd selection approach could help in eliciting mobile app requirements and features that could cater to the needs of a large audience.

There is a growing trend for groups associated with drug use to exploit social media platforms to propagate content that poses a risk to the population, especially those susceptible to drug use and addiction. Detecting drug-related social media content has become important for governments, technology companies, and those responsible for enforcing laws against proscribed drugs. Their efforts have led to the development of various techniques for identifying and efficiently removing drug-related content, as well as for blocking network access for those who create it. This study introduces a manually annotated Twitter dataset consisting of 112,057 tweets from 2008 to 2022, compiled for use in detecting associations connected with drug use. Working in groups, expert annotators classified tweets as either related or unrelated to drug use. The dataset was subjected to exploratory data analysis to identify its defining features. Several classification algorithms, including support vector machines, XGBoost, random forest, Naive Bayes, LSTM, and BERT, were used in experiments with this dataset. Among the baseline models, BERT with textual features achieved the highest F1-score, at 0.9044. However, this performance was surpassed when the BERT base model and its textual features were concatenated with a deep neural network model, incorporating numerical and categorical features in the ensemble method, achieving an F1-score of 0.9112. The Twitter dataset used in this study was made publicly available to promote further research and enhance the accuracy of the online classification of English-language drug-related content.

In the last fifteen years, an immense expansion has been witnessed in mobile app usage and production. The intense competition in the tech sector and also the rapidly and constantly evolving user requirements have led to increased burden on mobile app creators. Nowadays, fulfilling users’ expectations cannot be readily achieved and new and unconventional approaches are needed to permit an interested crowd of users to contribute in the introduction of creative mobile apps. Indeed, users and developers of mobile apps are the most influential candidates to engage in any of the requirements engineering activities. The place where both can best be found is on Twitter, one of the most widely used social media platforms. More interestingly, Twitter is considered as a fertile ground for textual content generated by the crowd that can assist in building robust predictive classification models using machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Therefore, in this study, we have built two classification models that can identify mobile apps users and developers using tweets. A thorough empirical comparison of different feature extraction techniques and machine learning classification algorithms were experimented with to find the best-performing mobile app user and developer classifiers. The results revealed that for mobile app user classification, the highest accuracy achieved was ≈0.86, produced via logistic regression (LR) using Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) with N-gram (unigram, bigram and trigram), and the highest precision was ≈0.86, produced via LR using Bag-of-Words (BOW) with N-gram (unigram and bigram). On the other hand, for mobile app developer classification, the highest accuracy achieved was ≈0.87, produced by random forest (RF) using BOW with N-gram (unigram and bigram), and the highest precision was ≈0.88, produced by multi-layer perception neural network (MLP NN) using BERTweet for feature extraction. According to the results, we believe that the developed classification models are efficient and can assist in identifying mobile app users and developers from tweets. Moreover, we envision that our models can be harnessed as a crowd selection approach for crowdsourcing requirements engineering activities to enhance and design inventive and satisfying mobile apps.

With the increasing reliance on social media as a primary source of news, the proliferation of rumors has become a pressing global concern that negatively impacts various domains, including politics, economics, and societal well-being. While significant efforts have been made to identify and debunk rumors in social media, progress in detecting and addressing such issues in the Arabic language has been limited compared to other languages, particularly English. This study introduces a context-aware approach to rumor detection in Arabic social media, leveraging recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our proposed method evaluates Arabic news posts by analyzing the emotions evoked by news content and recipients towards the news. Moreover, this research explores the impact of incorporating user and content features into emotion-based rumor detection models. To facilitate this investigation, we present a novel Arabic rumor dataset, comprising both news posts and associated comments, which represents a first-of-its-kind resource in the Arabic language. The findings from this study offer promising insights into the role of emotions in rumor detection and may serve as a catalyst for further research in this area, ultimately contributing to improved detection and the mitigation of misinformation in the digital landscape.

Social media platforms are increasingly enabling the propagation of content from groups related to drug use, thus posing risks for the wider population and, in particular, individuals who are amenable to drug use and drug addiction. The detection of drug use content on social media platforms is a priority for governments, technology companies, and drug law enforcement organizations. To counter this issue, various techniques have been developed to identify and promptly remove drug use content, while also blocking its creators from network access. In this paper, we introduce a manually annotated Twitter dataset, comprising 156,521 tweets published between 2008 and 2022, specifically compiled for the purpose of drug use detection. The dataset underwent annotation by several group of expert annotators who classified the tweets as either drug use or non-drug use. Exploratory data analysis was conducted to comprehend the dataset's characteristics. Various classification algorithms, including SVM, XGBoost, RF, NB, LSTM, and BERT were employed using the dataset. Among the traditional machine learning models, SVM utilizing term frequency-inverse document frequency features achieved the highest F1-Score (0.9017). However, BERT with textual features concatenated with numerical and categorical features in ensemble method surpassed the performance of traditional models, attaining F1-Score of 0.9112. To facilitate future research and enhance English online drug use classification accuracy, the dataset will be made publicly available.

The research area of activity recognition is fast growing with diverse applications. However, advances in this field have not yet been used to monitor the rehabilitation of individuals with spinal cord injury. Noteworthily, relying on patient surveys to assess adherence can undermine the outcomes of rehabilitation. Therefore, this paper presents and implements a systematic activity recognition method to recognize physical activities applied by subjects during rehabilitation for spinal cord injury. In the method, raw sensor data are divided into fragments using a dynamic segmentation technique, providing higher recognition performance compared to the sliding window, which is a commonly used approach. To develop the method and build a predictive model, a machine learning approach was adopted. The proposed method was evaluated on a dataset obtained from a single wrist-worn accelerometer. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in recognizing all of the activities that were examined, and it achieved an overall accuracy of 96.86%.

Nowadays, data has become important and influences the decision-making process on government and business sectors. Data governance strategy should not be underestimated because it increases the value of data and minimize data-related cost and risk. The data governance concept promotes the accomplishment of organizational objectives by developing and implementing an appropriate strategy for processing data in perfect and secure manner. This study aims to assess the maturity of data governance for Saudi sectors by design a framework and using it to measure whether the data governance have been applied or not. To do so, we have designed a questionnaire based on five criteria for assessing the current state of data governance implementation which are: policies and standards of data management, data quality, risk of poor data quality, cost of data correction, and data security. The questionnaire was then distributed to the employees in the IT department or who are related to data management or data security in Saudi sectors either government or private. The results show that approximately 48% of the respondents stated that they have a data governance committee in the sectors in which they work. Also, 55% of the respondents indicated that there are legislation and regulations for data governance in the sectors, as well as for making data available. Moreover, 42% from the respondents stated that their organizations have policies and procedures to enforce data management